Dancing in the rain

For those of you who love open wheel racing in the rain, the other day I bumped into this onboard footage of Patrick Depailler at Montreal. The circuit is so wet that it seems as if the 34-year-old is driving on a giant mirror.

As you can see in this onboard footage, the driver had a handful with lots of countersteering to keep the Tyrrell 008 pointed in the right direction. The 008 was powered by the venerable Cosworth DFV V8 which put down 485 hp to the massive rear tires. At the time this engine neared the end of its competitive racing career.

Nowadays we don't get to see the kind of footage seen here. Quoting from Jalopnic:

" What's so amazing about this video is how clear it is to the viewer the kind of work and adjustments that go into driving a F1 car. Everything is slowed down [due to the rain] so you can see it better. There is no question that driving a F1 car today is a more difficult task, faster will always be harder, but there's a kind of accessibility in these old videos that's missing today".



Depailler won the famed Monaco Grand Prix six months earlier. However, he finished just fifth in the standings against much stronger cars, such as the Lotus 78 and 79 in which Mario Andretti won the championship and his team mate Ronnie Peterson finished in second place.

Two years later Patrick Depailler would die in a testing accident at Hockenheim.

Source: Jalopnic.