Quote:
Originally Posted by porsche962fan
slight off topic
having watched some 70s F1 races recently and compared to today one thing strikes me about the grids themselves
in the 70s no grid was really the same !! , what I mean they were usually over 26 entries (on some meeting near 40 cars entered) so you can get variety on the backmarkers make the cut and some who don't
another aspect todays it's the dam same cars, same drivers and same liveries the whole season race after race !! it gets really tiresome and monotonous , back then you had quite a lot driver changes specially to midfield and and backmarkers, sponsor (livery) changes too , some teams had just 1 car, occasionally some of the bigger teams entered 3 cars, and you also had privateers using usually older cars
and then there are the car models themselves , it wasn't uncommon for teams to change models mid-sason , do some visible modifications or just engine supplier mid-season too
today everything seems to be "locked" how it starts is usually how it ends race by race all the way to the next season
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So all of that variability with drivers coming and going, teams switching chassis, power units, etc. Was that actually successful or was that just a bunch of enthusiastic and entertaining rabble at the tail end of the field just floundering about? I suspect the answer is that outside of an occasional nearly random success, they were just filling in the field. Why would anyone who was actually trying to win today do any of that? It would be suicide.
Plus as Alan52 calls out, the cost of doing that today would be astronomical. I really would love to see what it would have cost to run one of those 1970's teams in 2024 dollars. My assumption is the budgets would have been much smaller meaning it was probably easy for someone to scrape up enough funds to run a bit and have fun, but really have close to zero chance of winning. Or if the chance to win was higher, it was more down to the level of overall reliability back then being much worse. So that race results would have been more variable than today. A retirement of a car these days is a notable event!
Richard