One of the strangest ironies of the world’s most popular and advanced motorsports is that because of their strict restrictions in the interest of competition, their exceptionally advanced motorsport gearboxes are not as advanced as they could have potentially been.
A great illustration of why that became the case was the story of perhaps the best and most innovative gearbox in the history of motorsport, and how it lasted just two weeks.
The concept of continuous variable transmission (CVT), is that it is an evolution of the automatic gearbox. However, instead of going through a fixed number of gear ratios, each with a hard and often quite slow shifting process.
A CVT system fixes that using a pulley system that changes depending on the power that is needed, giving the car the exact amount of acceleration it needs, albeit at the expense of being less reliable and traditionally less capable of handling high-performance engines.
The Williams F1 team, who were already the class of the field in 1992 and 1993 thanks to the FW14B and FW15C cars, experimented with a CVT with a transmission belt strong enough to handle the intense forces of the all-conquering Renault engine of that time.
In a July 1993 test in Wales, test driver David Coulthard raved it around the Pembrey race circuit in Wales, along with a later test by Alain Menu, then a driver in the British Touring Car Championship.
It sounded exceptionally different; instead of the traditional sound of revs rising and falling as a car navigated the track, it remained constant and allegedly was several seconds faster than the already quick car with its conventional semi-automatic gearbox.
However, within two weeks of the test, the FIA issued an edict that banned all “driver aids” for 1994, with a clause that specifically banned CVTs as well as another rule that cars had to have at least four and no more than seven gears, banning CVT in practice regardless.
Had it been allowed, the sound of motorsport, and potentially motoring in general could have been far different.