The COAT - Round Two - Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta vs Williams FW14

[crmalcolm]

The fourteenth match in Round Two sees the Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta take on the Williams FW14.

The Alfa took a 4-2-1 3-way win over the Williams FW15C and McLaren MP4/1 in the first round, whilst the Williams defeated the Ferrari 158 4-0.


Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta (goodwood.com):
The Alfa Romeo 158 is not a Formula 1 car. There, that’s quite a way to start this paragraph on a list of the greatest F1 cars of all time. But it’s true. The 158 was built to race in voiturette class racing, a separate class in Grand Prix racing in the 1930s for cars with 1.5-litre engines, when the full GP cars had 3.0-litre units. Obviously completely blown away by the Auto Union and Mercedes Silver Arrows, as it literally wasn’t in the same class, the 158 was incredibly successful. Powered by a 1.5-litre straight-eight, and designed by Goiacchino Colombo – he of Ferrari V12 fame – they won 37 of the 41 races entered pre-F1. But, in the middle of its run, along came World War II, and suddenly motorsport was pretty redundant.

Post-war, racing began to return, but the automotive industry had either been devastated by the war, or turned itself completely to making kit for the war effort. So old racing cars were dragged out of storage, and pressed into service. The Alfetta was back racing in 1947, this time with a honking supercharger, allowing it to produce over 300PS (220kW). In 1950 someone had the rather fun idea of setting up a new World Championship of Drivers, and at Silverstone that year F1 as we know it (sort of) was born. Lining up on the grid were Guiseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Fagioli and Reg Parnell, all armed with Alfettas.

It needs no retelling that they dominated the race, and then the rest of the season. In fact the only reason the Alfetta doesn’t hold the record for most dominant F1 car of all time is that it didn’t enter every eligible race that season. You could argue that the Indy 500 wasn’t an F1 race, but it made up part of the World Championship and Alfa Romeo skipped it. Therefore the 158 won ‘only’ 85 per cent of the races that season – but 100 per cent of the races it entered. The next season the 158 returned as the 159 and.... well it won again. Now with a reworked De-Dion axle and much bigger superchargers meaning its engine produced 420PS (313kW) the 159 was still the class of the field. But that bigger supercharger meant the car was thirsty – in fact it managed only 1.2 miles per gallon. As a result it couldn’t repeat the same dominance, as former Alfa stalwart Enzo Ferrari’s team challenged with three wins toward the end of the season. But Fangio and Farina still won four races between them, and Fangio the title.

Alfa were double title winners, but short of cash, and retired from motorsport when the Italian government refused to help them meet costs of the new Alfa 160 with its bigger 2.5-litre engine. This, added to a surfeit of full F1 cars, meant that F1 would actually run to Formula 2 regs for the next two seasons. Leaving the impact of the Alfetta as not only one of the most successful F1 cars of all time, but also the first to cause a wholesale change of regulations.



Williams FW14(B) (goodwood.com):
When the Williams FW14 arrived on the scene it was a technological marvel, so far advanced of most of its competition it was hardly funny. Teething issues meant that it was never really in with a chance of winning the title that year, but Adrian Newey’s first iconic F1 design would still win seven races that season on its way to second in the championship. In fact, people forget that in that first season Nigel Mansell won only two races fewer than eventual champion Ayrton Senna, and his lack of real title contention was mostly down to the early season struggles that saw the FW14 retire six times in four races.

For 1992 work was done to the troublesome semi-automatic gearbox (which had been new to Williams for the first season of the FW14). New traction control systems and tweaked active suspension made this ‘B’ spec car an even more monstrous machine. To the naked eye the only real difference is a couple of protrusions by the front suspension pushrods, which contain some of the active suspension components.

Furnished with this new FW14B there was no stopping Mansell, who had been waiting for another opportunity to fight for the championship for so long that he’d already retired from F1 once. Mansell won the first five races in a row, a feat still to be beaten, and went on to win a record (at the time) nine races in the season. It also qualified on pole for all but one race in 1992 and added another 11 fastest laps.

[S griffin]

I would go for the dominant Alfa 158/159, but if we are including the FW14B, then the Williams it is. Probably the most technologically advanced car ever that helped Mansell breeze to the title