This article first appeared in The speedarticle Post 005
A photograph of a Formula 1 car shows you what it looks like. A Giorgio Piola drawing shows you how it works.
It started with a bet. Piola and his brother were both good at drawing. All four kids in the family were. But Giorgio and the brother closest to him in age fought about it constantly. My drawing is better than yours. No, mine is. One day they each sent a drawing to a magazine. The magazine wrote back to Giorgio. Only Giorgio. They liked his work, and by the way, there was a Grand Prix in Monaco in 20 days. Did he want to come produce a technical report? He was 19. He went. He was supposed to be studying engineering, and he did not go back to studying engineering.
His father was one of eight lawyers to the Pope. Nearly the authority of a cardinal. Very religious. Prayer before eating, after eating. No talking at the table. Everyone up at seven. Giorgio came home from a disco at five or six in the morning once and at seven received a glass of water in the face from his mother. The rule was seven. His father wanted all of his sons to have degrees, and Giorgio was the only one who didn't get one. They barely spoke for a while. "I think later on he did appreciate it," Piola says, "because I'd really created a new job."
That was 1969. He's now attended over 900 Grands Prix. More than any driver, any team principal, any engineer. The person who has been to the most Formula 1 races in history is a man with a pen.
The pen for most of those decades was a Rapidograph 03. The big cutaway drawings started from a blank sheet and took 45 days. He would build the perspective, then draw everything by hand, and the shadow on a single tire alone could take three or four days. Somewhere in the early '80s his first wife walked into his studio and told him the drawing was dead. She designed fashion. The lines were all the same weight, she said. "You have to make some lines very thin and others very wide," she told him, "to create a shadow." He took a photocopy of an old drawing and re-inked every line with varied thickness. "From that year I always did this," Giorgio says. "It's one of the secrets of the drawing."
You see it everywhere in the archive. Open the MP4/4 file and the left side gives you the Marlboro livery, the bodywork as it looked on a television broadcast in 1988. The right side is peeled open. Engine, radiator, plumbing, callouts circled and numbered, his signature at the bottom. Senna and Prost won 15 of 16 races in that car. There's a color rendering of the Ferrari F1-90 with airflow mapped across the body in marker, red arrows over the top, blue through the sidepod intakes, yellow where the radiator cores sit. A detail study from Imola, just the top of a turbo Ferrari engine, exhaust runners and wastegates and plumbing, with "Scarichi" scrawled in the margin. Exhausts. An Arrows-Porsche rear end with every exhaust runner traced to the collector, the spring and damper units, the uprights, five callouts. He was standing behind that car looking at it.
Nobody told him what was new. He figured it out. "When I walk in front of a garage, nobody tells me the secret," Piola says. "But I see the car and immediately my eyes go like a magnet to the piece that's different." He trained his eyes as a kid, spotting differences in puzzle magazines while his mother did crosswords. He once deduced a hidden slot in a Mercedes front wing by watching a mechanic's hand gesture. Nobody confirmed it. He drew the hole anyway. When a car crashed and was lifted later, the slot was exactly where he said it was. Patrick Head, Gordon Murray, John Barnard, Adrian Newey. He stood next to all of them and drew what he saw. "I'm not an engineer," he says, "so I talked in a very simple way, and most of it I showed with the drawing." The engineers liked what he was doing, which also made him a problem. At Watkins Glen he found a hidden valve on the Ligier JS11 that dumped the ground effects at speed. The designer was furious. At Lotus, Colin Chapman confronted him about a drawing of a secret wing car. Piola tore it up in front of him. After that, the relationship was fantastic. He could look at anything. Even from underneath.
He once drew a 12-cylinder engine in a hurry, two nights before a deadline, and put seven intake trumpets on one side of a flat engine instead of six. He kept a poster of that drawing in front of his laptop for 20 years. "Just to remind myself not to rush," he says.
Piola’s archive goes on and on. Thousands of originals and scans organized by season, by race, by team. The 2015 season alone fills hundreds of files. His filing system is in Italian. Cartella. Capitolo. Folder. Chapter. There are full cutaways of cars that no longer exist in the configurations he drew them, detail crops of aero updates that lasted one qualifying session, book layouts for the annual Formula One Technical Analysis series he's published since 1994. He invented this job. Trackside technical illustration, produced in real time, for print. Nobody did it before him and almost nobody did it after.
"When I stop, I stop… The day I stop Formula 1, I won't even look at a car on television. Because I love it too much."
