Those skirts were to make a seal between the underbody and the road, a crucial part in propagating negative pressure beneath the car. The central tub was unusually narrow and the sidepods took up a far bigger proportion of the car’s width, while running along the bottom of those sidepods were skirts – brushes initially, later solid nylon. The proportions of the 78 (as seen in the image below) were very different to those of its contemporaries, and therein lay the clue to the radically different way its aerodynamics worked. Forty years ago, the 78’s successor, the Lotus 79, became the first ground effect car to win the world championship, with Mario Andretti at the wheel.

The car which made that breakthrough was the Lotus 78 of 1977, which ushered F1 into the era of ground effect. Getting the principle to work on a skinny-bodied, open-wheel single seater initially seemed unfeasible. But they were cars with wide, wheel-enclosing, bodywork. The idea of using the underside of a racing car to generate negative pressure and effectively suck the car towards the track had first been exploited in the Can-Am sports cars series in the 1960s.

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