Photo by Legends Of Motorsports, via Flickr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0). - Credit Links at the end of the content
The 1970s were pure chaos in F1. Every team was experimenting, hoping to create an innovation that could work and shock the paddock, and one of those was Ensign N179.
We know that in the late 1970s, F1 was evolving rapidly, with Team Lotus introducing revolutionary ideas others could barely understand, Ferrari pushing forward with their powerful engines, and Renault daring to change the future with turbo engines.
Ensign N179 Story
Ensign N179, remembered forever as the ‘Cheese Grater,’ belongs firmly in the second category, it was one of the boldest cooling experiment ever attempted in F1, and also one of the fastest abandoned.
When it appeared at the 1979 South African GP, nobody could ignore it, the car did not just look different, it looked wrong.
The Radical Idea Behind the Madness
By 1979, F1 had entered the era of ground effect.
Lotus produced their Lotus 78 in 1977 season, and then perfected the Lotus 79 for 1978 season.
In 1977, Team Lotus introduced a revolutionary concept. It became the first car to truly maximize ground effect, with its underbody shaped like an upside-down airplane wing, using the Venturi effect to pull the car down onto the track.
However, traditional radiators, mounted in the sidepods, had suddenly become a problem. They disrupted airflow and limited how efficiently ground effect could work, engineers everywhere were searching for ways to free up that critical space.
Ensigns’s designer, Dave Baldwin and Shahab Ahmad, believed they had the answer, instead of placing the radiators in the sidepods like everyone else, they moved them to the very front of the car.
What made it even more interesting, not just one radiator, but three of them.
They were stacked vertically on the nose, directly in front of the cockpit, forming a flat, layered surface that immediately reminded observers of a household cheese grater, and the nickname stuck instantly, and not in a flattering way.
The theory made sense on paper, with the sidepods completely cleared, they expected that the car could maximize ground effect and produce more downforce.
At least, that was the hope for the team.
The Hidden Problem No One Could Ignore
Almost immediately, reality exposed the flaw, radiators work by transferring heat into airflow, but airflow at the front of an F1 car behaves differently than along the sides.
The nose area did not provide the consistent cooling performance engineers had predicted.
Instead of efficiently removing head from the engine, the system struggled, temperatures climbed, reliability dropped.
It was not only it, the stacked radiators did something far workse, they turned the cockpit into a furnace.
All the heat extracted from the engine had to go somewhere, and much of it was expelled straight toward the driver.
Instead of being directed away from the cockpit, waves of hot air blasted directly into it.
The result was not what they expected, cockpit temperatures rose dramatically, and driving conditions became unbearable.
This was not just uncomfortable. It was dangerous.
Derek Daly’s Nightmare Weekend
Behind the wheel of the Ensign N179 was Derek Daly, experienced driver, but even he could not overcome the flaws of this radical experiment.
From the start, the problems were obvious, the engine ran too hot, the cockpit felt suffocating, the car lacked balance and speed.
Daly could only manage 25th place in qualifying, at a time when grids were limited, this meant he failed to qualify entirely.
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Why the Ensign N179 Concept Failed So Completely
The front radiator experiment was not caused by one single issue, it was the result of several problems working together.
Cooling, despite the large surface area, was worse than expected, and the airflow at the nose simply did not provide the stable thermal performance needed.
Instead of protecting the driver from the heat, the design exposed them directly to them.
The idea did not work, and the concept vanished before it raced.
Moving the radiators was not simply a packaging trick, it was done to protect the airflow that powered the ground-effect system, traditional sidepods radiators sat directly in the path of the Venturi tunnels, disturbing the smooth, high-speed air needed underneath the car, and by relocating the radiators, they were able to keep the venturi tunnels clean and uninterrupted along the full length of the sidepods, and this allowed air to accelerate more efficiently through the tunnels, which lowered pressure beneath the car and it increased suction. However, the Ensign N179 failed due to fundamental aerodynamics flaws that contracticted the laws of physics, and the angled nose created aerodynamic lift by generating high pressure at the front, leading to poor steering, while vertically stacked radiators in a high-pressure zone caused stagnant airflow and overheating.
Immediate Abandonment and Quiet Disappearance
The team had no choice, Ensign reacted quickly, and the Cheese Grater nose was removed almost immediately after disastrous debut.
The car was redesigned with conventional sidepods-mounted radiators, returning to the layout used by every other team.
Even after abandoning the radical cooling concept, the N179 never became competitive, they struggled throughout the season.
Despite its failure, the Ensign N179 remains one of F1’s most fascinating experimental cars.
The Cheese grater was one of those spectacular failures, it lasted only days in its original form, yet it became unforgettable.
Photo by Legends Of Motorsports, via Flickr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
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