Posted on Thursday 08 Sep 2011
AT&T Williams Director of Engineering, Patrick Head, reflects on the use of ABS brakes in Formula One in the early ’90s. The cars could stop on a sixpence, but that wasn’t altogether a good thing for the sport…
“ABS had a huge impact on car performance because the drivers could brake incredibly late and know that they weren’t going to lock a wheel. It probably wasn’t great for overtaking, but it brought lap times down a lot.
“The system was complex, but by ’93 we’d designed a very good, high-fidelity, high-response anti-lock braking system that dealt with each wheel individually. The brake pedal pushed a balance bar with two master cylinders, as per normal, but the master cylinders didn’t feed fluid to the brakes. They had pressure sensors that told the system how much the driver wanted to stop the car and the system then applied brake pressure to the wheels individually to keep them on the limit of locking.
“The system applied the most braking force to the wheels that were loaded up. When you had a lot of load transfer onto the front, the system would apply more work to the front axle and less to the back. Equally, it would apply more work to the outside wheels through a corner, which is why you didn’t see inside wheels locking up like you do today.
“If the system was working as it was designed to work, it was impossible for the driver to lock a wheel. At the end of a long straight, he’d just stamp on the pedal as hard as he could, so you could argue that it took away a skill from the driver. I fully accept that it was a driver aid in the same way traction control was and it wasn’t altogether a surprise when ABS was banned at the end of ’93.
“But it was interesting technology and it was relevant to the road, which the manufacturers liked. In a way, it’s going to make a comeback in 2013 because the amount of KERS is going to be much higher than it is at the moment and you won’t be able to harvest that level of power from the rear axle without having anti-lock braking available.”
Credit: Williams F1 (www.williamsf1.com)
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