#fomet-1

[rogue-driv3r]

Yep early 90s gave us the best looking (and sounding) F1 cars imo

[rogue-driv3r]

Sim racing adventures

Now that some mods got an updated physics, making 'em more realistic (a '92 Ferrari was as fast as a F2004, wtf), I had the opportunity to feel the early 90s insanity.

Concept: it's 1991, turbo engines have been banned two years earlier, now we have big and screaming 3.5 liters engines attached to ultra lightweight chassis (505 kg including water, oil and driver, holy shit) with relatively simple aerodynamics. There are a lot of Teams entering the Championship, with huge differences between Top Teams who got the most advanced chassis and aerodynamics supported by the most powerful engines, and small private Teams, with rudimental components, and cheap (ish) less powerful engines, who assembled their cars in modest sheds. Semi-automatic gearboxes were used by a small number of Teams, while everyone else had to handle everything through clutch and stick. Crazy.

The obvious consequence was that performance gaps between teams was huge. Many small teams struggled to set a decent lap time in qualifying and be allowed to race. Those who passed and could race on Sunday often had to retire for mechanical problems, and almost never caught championship points unless they were very, very lucky. Early 90s can tell the stories of the most unsuccessful, almost embarrassing F1 Teams.

So: cars were fast, as they weighted a third of a standard nowadays daily and the least powerful engines still produced over 600 bhp. Safety was never an option, just look at the completely missing head protections, the fragility of components... Somehow nobody died in a crash until Roland and Senna in '94.

Here comes the sim racing, to answer the question: "how is it like to drive a bottom field '91 car?" Well, let me answer with another question: "how the fuck could they keep that thing on track for an entire race - when they could complete a race without some kind of failure, or simply be allowed to race?"

The car I decided to get to know better was the Fondmetal FOMET-1, powered by the older version of the Ford Cosworth V8, the DFR, producing "just" 630 bhp. Chassis was strongly derived by the acquired Osella, so overall performance was logically poor, probably only slightly better than the Coloni. It still had an analogic rev counter!

Driving: the car is fucking unstable, very hard to setup, slow on straights because of low power and aero resistance, while heel-and-toe is mandatory unless you want to lose the rear end at every brake - actually that's a common rule for rwd manual cars, but in this case... you do feel the need to blip the throttle. Taking a corner in a decent way is really hard. I've driven complex and demanding cars, but this is just a terrible project. I'm not surprised that these could barely race. Fascinating.