High Wings in F1 - #Blogpost

Back in the 60s, F1 cars were constantly developing with all sorts of new innovations being introduced by various different teams, but it was in 1968 when teams started to discover that adding wings would provide them with downforce and make their cars corner faster.

As time went on the wings started to grow in size, with them getting bigger and bigger as teams tried to extract as much cornering capability out of their cars. As the 1969 season approached, the wings on the F1 cars had gone to crazy levels of size.

Most of the 1969 F1 cars were sporting massive wings both front and back with the struts for the wings being attached to the suspension.

These wings however, came with a downside. They weren’t very strong and so they suffered a number of failures. For the first race at Kyalami Jack Brabham had been on pole but was overtaken on the first lap and soon had the entrie rear wing of his car collapse. Jackie Stewart would win the race with his Matra MS10 which also had the massive high wings attached to it.

The second race of the season would take place at Montjuich Park in Spain and teams were still continuing to push the limits with the wings, making them as high as they could and as light as possible which made them structurally weak. The drivers didn’t like driving the cars with the high wings and wanted them banned and felt that they were unsafe, however the Commission Sportive Internationale didn’t take any action.

The race was once again won by Jackie Stewart During the race both Lotus’s of Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill would suffer massive crashes when the wings their cars would come under huge pressure while going over a crest and would loose downforce. Both drivers would suffer injuries from the crash and Jochen Rindt had to miss the next race at Monaco due to his injuries.

For the next race in Monaco, teams had been told that high wings were banned however, it wasn’t an official decision and so most of the teams still used the high wings. The Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) would then go on to make the decision to ban rear wings entirely for Monaco aswell as the next race at the Netherlands.

The ban was for rear wings in particular but the front wings also weren’t allowed to be wider or higher than the car itself. The Monaco Grand Prix was run without wings and was won by Graham Hill

Rear wings would of course return to F1 after the Monaco Grand Prix but with heavy restrictions on their hight, width and their location and movable aero parts were banned.