When Cosworth built its own F1 car – with four-wheel drive
Cosworth’s engines dominated F1 in the 60s and 70s – but it also made its own unconventional race car
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by Kris Culmer
3 mins read
18 April 2025
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Cosworth became famous the world over in the late 1960s as its Ford-funded ‘DFV’ V8 engine totally dominated Formula 1 – something it would continue to do throughout the 1970s.
In fact, its final grand prix win didn’t come until 1983. It’s one of the most admirable of the many ‘blokes in a shed beat all the car industry giants’ stories Britain produced in the last century. It’s not well known, though, that Cosworth at this time created not only its own F1 engine but its own F1 car – and a highly unconventional one at that.
This unnamed racer was dreamed up by Cosworth co-founders Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth, both former Lotus engineers, and Robin Herd, who started his career as a design engineer on Concorde, and then designed McLaren’s first-ever grand prix winner.
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“It is something entirely new in single-seater aerodynamics, structure and the detail arrangement of the transmission,” we reported on its July 1969 unveiling.
The Cosworth was far from alone in using four-wheel drive. The potential of a 4WD system had been shown as long ago as 1961, when Stirling Moss had won a non-championship race in an F1 car created by British tractor company Ferguson (which had then in 1966 contributed the first 4WD system for a road car, the Jensen FF), and it was an obvious solution when F1 engines became so powerful (with more than 400bhp) that cars started to struggle to put it all down.
Lotus had seemed to prove the theory by almost winning the 1969 Indianapolis 500 with a gas-turbine 4WD car, and Matra’s Jackie Stewart told us: “There isn’t a tail slide and there isn’t a lot of understeer; you can balance the car much better and therefore you can get out of corners quicker, and if you do that, you get down the straights quicker.”
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Working on 4WD were Cosworth, BRM, Lotus, Matra, McLaren and Ferrari. Most integrated Ferguson’s proven system into existing chassis, but Northampton went its own way.
We reported: “Drive is taken from the engine, which is installed with the flywheel end forward, to a two-shaft gearbox with Hewland gears to give a wide choice of ratios.
An extra gear, mounted on the end of the second motion shaft, takes the drive sideways to an angled bevel differential from which it is taken to the front and rear final drives. The torque-split ratio is likely to be about 40:60 front to rear, with further adjustment possible by altering front and rear wheel diameters.
“The rear drive passes under the right-hand cylinder bank of the engine and is then taken sideways across the back of the engine by a pair of spur wheels, suitably cased, to the rear differential.
“The front driveshaft –which, like the rear, is a solid shaft with Hooke joints – is taken through a guard tube directly to the front differential, side-step gears being unnecessary [here].
“Two points in the layout of this drive stand out. One is that by arranging the fore-and-aft drive lines on the right-hand side of the car (Lotus and McLaren have theirs on the left), it has been possible to eliminate an idler wheel between the gearbox and the centre differential. This is necessary in the other designs to match the rotation of the engine and transmission.
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The other is that it is believed that free differentials, without anti-spin mechanisms, are used in the front and rear final drives as well as in the centre differential.” Lotus entered its 4WD 63 at Zandvoort – but not with its lead driver Jochen Rindt at the wheel, as he hated it so much in testing that he refused to race it! Also in that race was Matra’s 4WD MS80, later labelled by a driver simply as “undrivable”.
And after racing his own team’s 4WD M9A at Silverstone, Bruce McLaren apparently said it was like “signing your name with someone pushing your hand along”. Little wonder, then, that Cosworth’s 4WD contender never graced a grid.
“4WD in F1 has been something of an anti-climax,” we concluded in August 1969, and bar a single 1971 appearance of an experimental Lotus powered by a gas turbine, it has never again been tried.
Photo Credit: Lothar Spurzem
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