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Bernie Ecclestone was never much of a racer when it came to Formula 1, but before he took over the sport as CEO, he was a successful driver manager and team owner.
Although he never qualified for a Formula 1 race, Bernie Ecclestone managed the career of Jochen Rindt, F1’s only posthumous world champion.
On top of this, Ecclestone purchased the Brabham team in 1972, winning two drivers’ championships in the process, thanks to Nelson Piquet.
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He gained ultimate control over the sport when he co-founded FOCA (Formula One Constructors’ Association) and sold the television rights in the 1970s, before using the Concorde Agreement to take ultimate control of the sport, before selling to Liberty Media in 2017.
Ecclestone won 22 races while he was in charge of Brabham, but one in particular, the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, stands out.
It’s where the Brabham BT46B made its one and only appearance on the grid, and while it earned Niki Lauda a dominant victory, it was never seen again on a Formula 1 circuit.
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How Bernie Ecclestone’s BT46B won the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix before immediately disappearing
Brabham were competing with Lotus and Tyrrell for the 1978 championship, and arrived at the Scandinavian Raceway in Anderstorp with a new version of the BT46 that had started the season.
It quickly became known as the ‘fan car’, designed by Gordon Murray and using modified radiators on the nose of the car, and flat panel heat exchangers to replace the typical radiators.
The most prominent new feature was a large fan attached to the back of the car that created a huge amount of downforce, although its ‘primary function’ was to increase cooling, exploiting a loophole in the current regulations.
Mario Andretti was on pole position for Lotus in Sweden, with Lauda and his Brabham teammate John Watson directly behind him.
Watson failed to finish the race as a throttle issue saw him spin off the track on lap 19, but Lauda went on to win the Grand Prix by 34 seconds.
However, Ecclestone decided to withdraw the ‘fan car’ before the next race in France.
It’s believed he didn’t want to upset his fellow team owners with the exploits that Murray had discovered in his efforts to keep everyone onside as he hoped to secure his position as the chief executive of FOCA.
Gordon Murray explains that Brabham’s ‘fan car’ was never banned by Formula 1
The ‘fan car’ made a reappearance at Goodwood years later, and when he found out it was going to return to a race track, Lauda gave the following advice on how to drive it, via Magneto Magazine: “Drive it with your foot flat, and it’ll stick to the road. Drive it like a front-wheel-drive car, change down before the corner, and nail it. It sits down, loading up the suspension. You’ll turn in, whatever the speed.”
In his book One Formula: 50 Years of Car Design, Murray also spoke about the BT46B. He explained: “I read the regulations again and Article 3.7 on aerodynamic devices said, ‘Anything that’s primary function is to have an aerodynamic influence on the car must always remain stationary and be fixed relative to the sprung mass of the car’. I spoke to a lawyer friend, and said, ‘What does primary function mean?’ and he said, ‘Well, how many functions are there?’ I said, ‘Two’. So he said, ‘The primary function is the one that has more than half the influence.’
“So if we could get [side] skirts to seal like the Lotus ones and have a cooling fan that uses more than 50 per cent of its flow to cool the car and the rest to suck the car down…
“A lot of stuff has been written that says we tried to hide the fact that it was sucking the car down. We didn’t. We always said, ’It sucks the car down, but that’s not its primary function. Its primary function is cooling.’
“People were photographing the fan blades, so the mechanics found a dustbin lid, which fitted perfectly! We were so fast, Bernie didn’t want to p— everybody off completely, so he made the drivers qualify on full tanks.
”The one thing that’s been completely misreported in all the books and magazines is that the car was banned. It was never banned.
“I have still got the letter from the CSI, the ruling technical body in those days. I had explained already to the scrutineers that more than 50 per cent went through the radiator, and the rest of it sucked the car down; I wasn’t trying to hide it.
“They wrote me a letter that said, ‘It’s absolutely legal. You can run it until the end of the year, but then we will close the loophole.’
“It was Bernie who came to me and asked me to withdraw the car because he was being put under massive pressure from [Colin] Chapman and [Ken] Tyrrell, and the other constructors.
“Bernie was just getting powerful in Formula 1, and they said, ‘If you carry on racing that car, that’s the end of the Formula One Constructors Association. You can forget it; we are walking away from it.’”
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