This car, Lot 223, sold for $1,121,016 (€1,040,000), including buyer’s premium, at RM Sotheby’s Monaco auction on May 11, 2024.
One of the most hackneyed yet universally true statements in the world of technological development is, “You can’t know if it works until you’ve tried it.” The Tyrrell six-wheeler is a shining example.
Six for success?
For all their grace and beauty, Formula cars are almost by definition an aerodynamic disaster. Without fenders, it is almost impossible to hide the fact that the first thing the wind stream sees is two spinning blocks of rubber. In the case of mid-1970s Formula 1 cars, that is about 460 square inches of frontal area.
There are ways to deal with the airflow, mostly with the design of the front wing, but the regulations in place at the time limited those to 1.5 meters in width, which barely got to the inside rim of the tires. This effectively meant that everybody had the same problem, along with the same engine (only Ferrari had a good alternative to the Cosworth DFV), the same transaxle, etc., which made for a level playing field. Yet the search for an “unfair advantage” is constant.
The rules specified a maximum front-rim width but never mentioned a rim diameter, so the idea of tucking a very short tire under the wing and thus out of the airflow was intriguing. A small tire has a smaller contact patch, so you’d have to use two per side to get that traction back, and the smaller brakes would be doubled as well. There are a mess of technical issues having to do with steering four wheels instead of two, but a good designer could resolve those, and cutting your frontal area roughly in half is worth a lot towards winning. As mentioned in the catalog, the designer figured it would be worth about 40 horsepower. The revolution was all at the front: From the cockpit back, it was standard Tyrrell design.
Of course, the whole thing depended on getting someone to supply a suitable small tire. During this period, Goodyear was the only supplier for Formula 1 and was effectively selling spec 13-inch tires to everybody. Surprisingly, it proved willing to design and build an equivalent tire to fit a 10-inch rim for Tyrrell — in absolute secrecy, which was a challenge in itself.
In the end it all came together, and the racing world was flabbergasted when Tyrrell’s six-wheeled F1 car was introduced. Even for Tyrrell, it was weird; enough so that it wasn’t given a standard designation, being called P34, unlike the earlier 007 or subsequent 008.
The best-laid plans…
It was an experiment, a gamble, one of those quixotic attempts that occasionally show up in history, sometimes rewriting the future and sometimes failing miserably. In the end P34 did neither, but it sure was interesting — and a lot of fun. The aerodynamic concept proved good, it was plenty fast in a straight line, but the complexities and realities of having four front wheels on mid-1970s racetracks proved too great for the advantages it offered. It is important to remember that this was 50 years ago, and the best tracks were rough by today’s standards. The rest were even worse.
Braking was the biggest issue. Each wheel had its own brake, but having two half-sized contact patches lined up on a rough surface made keeping one or the other from locking up in threshold braking a serious challenge. This was complicated by the fact that the small wheels were hidden from the driver’s view. There is a window cut into the cockpit so the driver can see the tires, but it is a horrible distraction if you are playing at the limit in traffic. To get the wheels fully inside the wing’s protection, the front track was shrunk, which reduced turn-in grip, further complicating things.
All in all, the P34 was a fabulous and exciting experiment that really didn’t work. For the 1977 season, Tyrrell made some fixes, but with little improvement. Plus, Goodyear wasn’t willing to develop the special tires like it did the standard ones, so tires went away. The approach had a few good races on very smooth, fast tracks (and even won a minor race), but in the end, it just wasn’t worth it. Tyrrell went back to the four-wheel 008 in 1978 and never looked back.
A fun curiosity
So why would anyone want to have one of these cars, and how would you set a value? The obvious answer to the first question is that this Tyrrell is just so incredibly cool. Only a few were built, it is different than anything else and it was actually competitive, if only for a while. No serious collection of 3-liter Formula 1 cars should be without one, and if you want to go play with it, you will be welcome anywhere. With a Cosworth DFV and Hewland combo, it’s not difficult to run, and race tires are still available. On the other hand, the P34 was never a great or particularly important car.
RM Sotheby’s Monaco sale had a good variety of similar cars, so establishing relative market values is straightforward. At the bottom, weapons-grade cars such as the March 761 are getting $350k–$400k. Cars with more collectibility, such as the Tyrrell 007 or 1977 Wolf, make between $600k–$800k. McLarens carry a premium and are worth more: $900k–$1.1m. Any car with wins or podium finishes, particularly with famous drivers, is $1.5m and above. Any Ferrari of that era is well over $6m.
Our subject car never turned a wheel in-period. It was built up from an incomplete monocoque tub and leftover bits that were accumulated in the ’90s. It appears to have first been driven in 2008. It seems that six or seven P34s were built by Tyrrell in-period, and I expect that they all still exist. This car is number 8. It has no history and is easily the least-valuable P34 extant. It is still a real car and welcome everywhere, though I expect less so if a premium event gets multiple entries. Its value sits comfortably above the run-of-the-mill 3-liter cars but well below the highly desirable ones. As it was in-period, it remains an exciting, interesting and fun character actor in a script starring great ones. As such, it was fairly purchased. ♦
