The Fittipaldi F1 team: no sugar, no beer, no fizz

As well as working with Wilson, Divila got involved with Emerson’s Lotus 69 F2 in ’71: “We modified Emerson’s car quite a lot, and eventually it was almost all our car and we had quite a successful year with it. That was the first step towards designing our own car.”

With his confidence now sky high, Divila went radical for the first Fittipaldi F1 car, the FD01. Wilson explains: “At that time we had a maximum size for front and rear wings in the regulations, so we had to try to find a way to make the car faster in a straight line. Because of that we had the first F1 car in modern history to enclose the engine and the gearbox completely. Our car was very, very streamlined. And we decided that if I sat lower we could have our airbox lower. But making a decision like that for your first F1 car is a mistake!”

Wilson tested the car at São Paulo’s Interlagos circuit. “That was okay,” says Divila, “because Wilson knew the place backwards. But when we went to Argentina for the first race he couldn’t see the apex at any of the corners!” Wilson went out in a fiery accident, but work was simultaneously being carried out on a second car, which Wilson raced in Brazil and in which the driving position was propped up.

“It was a bit of a cock-up,” admits Divila of the ’75 season. “We were very young (Divila was still only 27), we did not have enough experience and technically we were too brave. There were a lot of good ideas, but even in England it would have been difficult to do them!”

Emerson joined the team from McLaren for ’76 as driver, while Wilson decided to stand down. The move shocked the F1 world. “I was in negotiations to continue with McLaren,” says Emerson. “But I don’t think Teddy (Mayer, the team boss) was very fair with what he offered to me.” (Divila reckons that, to stay at McLaren, his old friend had been offered three-quarters what Niki Lauda was to earn at Ferrari). “Wilson was building a new car for ’76 that was conventional and looked good and Richard was doing very well. I thought ‘Why not? It’s the time to go now and decided to do it. It was a very difficult decision, but I had a lot of idealisme to have this team materialise.”

Fittipaldi set some stunning times in testing at Interlagos prior to the season-opening Brazilian Grand Prix and was third fastest on the first day of qualifying. He then sprained his elbow in a charity tennis match and slipped to fifth on Saturday. “For the race we fooled ourselves by installing one of the first electronic-ignition engines,” says Divila. “We thought, ‘If it’s new it’s better’. A small pickup on the front wasn’t well tightened, it moved forward and touched a little aluminium plate you have at the front of the belt-drive, so we had aluminium chips flying around everywhere and it was cutting out. We changed everything in a pitstop, but it’s a shame — I’m sure we could have had a podium.”

The relationship had started well but soon deteriorated. Emerson had his own ideas on engineering and Divila was not pushy enough to fight his corner. “I could control Wilson quite well because we had a working relationship right back to Formula Vee,” he says, “but Emerson was out of my control. I didn’t have the authority to tell someone who had a very good reputation as a test driver that he’s barking up the wrong tree. He was an extremely good test driver when he had someone like Colin Chapman, but for his old karting mate it was difficult to say no.”

Already ex-Lotus man Ralph Bellamy was working on the F6 for ’79, but that was a disaster. “My opinion is we made a mistake changing designers so much,” offers Emerson. “Ralph’s car was a beautiful one but very radical for the time. It was the most expensive grand prix car built at that time — it was a piece of art. It took a year and a half to build and was incredible technically, but the chassis was just too soft and had no rigidity. We lost a lot of time and money on that car.”

Up to this stage most of the cars were built in Brazil, even if the race team was based in England, but when Fittipaldi took over the Wolf team for 1980 it moved entirely into that squad’s Reading premises. Postlethwaite, Warr and Rosberg all stayed on from Wolf, the Finn joining Emerson in the driver lineup as the team expanded to a full-time two-car effort, initially using the ’79 Wolf chassis.

“The first race with Keke was Argentina,” says Wilson. “But Keke destroyed one car on Friday, one on Saturday (although the Autosport report of the time says that one of the cars was actually sidelined by an oil leak). So I organised the team to work all night to fix a car using parts from both cars to assemble a new one for the race. And Keke finished third.” As well as that, Rosberg had outqualified Fittipaldi by 2.45sec… Wilson continues: “At the end of qualifying Emerson asked, ‘Which engine did you give to him?’ and I thought, ‘Maybe now we’ve sparked another problem!’”

More accidents from Rosberg meant that results with the new F8 late in the season were not what they might have been, but his speed was clear. Emerson, meanwhile, retired: “The full ground-effect cars, with the moveable skirts, had so much downforce that you had to have big balls to go deeper and faster into the fast corners. It was unbelievable and there was no feeling — I lost motivation and the desire.”

Unfortunately, he had also lost Copersucar (at the end of 1979) and then Skol. Wilson explains: “The pressure in South America was too much and people didn’t have time to wait. People outside the business don’t understand how difficult it is to make a competitive F1 car. It’s nearly impossible to explain to them how it’s so complicated.”

Emerson stayed on as the team’s figurehead. “We had a great car from Harvey and we were trying to get that breakthrough, like Frank Williams when he got sponsorship from the Saudis,” he says. “We wanted to try and get through that same period.”

But that breakthrough proved elusive. “We had no money,” says Divila. “In ’82 we wanted a consortium of sponsors for the 16 races. We managed to get 13 sponsor rotations, but we only got paid for six.” Although Wilson says the team was owned by him, with Emmo taking a share when he joined as driver, Divila claims he had a 33 per cent share. “I lost $1,317,282,” he says. “That will be on my tombstone! We were kids coming out of Brazil to go racing. We sold our cars, watches, everything to make it. And we lost it all and were back to zero.”

But those ‘kids’ are all still proud of their efforts, and you can hear the emotion in Wilson’s voice when he talks of the restoration of the FD01. At the end of last year Wilson, his ex-F1 racing son Christian and Ingo Hoffmann (who drove in a handful of races for the team in 1976 and ’77) steered the car around Interlagos. “The car is beautiful. Fantastic,” he bubbles. “I told Christian and Ingo, ‘If you crash this car I kill you!’ We had a big media presentation. Everyone was very excited and after 30 years I never imagined I would see my son driving the car I built. It was a very special day in my life.”

Back in its Copersucar livery, you can imagine this particular sugar additive was a sweet moment.