F1 Suspension Systems: 75 Years of Engineering Evolution, Live from Silverstone

It's 2025, and Silverstone is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the very first Formula 1 Grand Prix, held on this exact track back in 1950. To mark the occasion, the British circuit gathered a lineup that will likely never be assembled again: the cars of all 34 F1 World Champions, from Giuseppe Farina to Max Verstappen. The perfect backdrop to talk technical — and specifically, about suspension.

The part everyone forgets about

Think race car, and you picture a huge engine, an oversized wing, ground effect sucking the chassis to the tarmac. Suspension stays in the shadows. Yet in Formula 1, it exists for one thing only: pure performance, not driver comfort. A good suspension has to strike an almost impossible balance between compliance — to climb kerbs and put power down — and stiffness — for crisp direction changes and to avoid bottoming out at 300 km/h on a full tank.

To chase that balance, engineers have explored five major architectures since 1950. This video breaks them down one by one, car by car.

1. Leaf spring suspension: the prehistoric era

The most primitive system. No separate upper wishbone and spring here — a single metal leaf does both jobs. When the wheel hits a bump, the leaf bends, then its natural elasticity pulls the wheel back down.

To illustrate it, the video features a 500cc Formula 3 car, the British discipline from the 1940s where Stirling Moss started out — the same type of car he raced at the 1949 Goodwood Grand Prix, already covered on the channel. The upside of leaf springs: rugged and easy to maintain. The downside: as speeds climbed, damping and weight became real problems. Coil springs were next.

2. Conventional double-wishbone suspension

The layout everyone still recognizes today: an upper and a lower wishbone, with a damper mounted between the chassis and the lower arm. The motion is direct, a 1:1 ratio — the wheel goes up, the wishbone goes up, the damper compresses.

The video walks through three pivotal cars:

• The Maserati 250F driven by Juan Manuel Fangio, a fascinating in-between: leaf springs at the rear, coil spring and damper at the front.
• The 1979 Shadow driven by Elio de Angelis, who tragically lost his life in 1986 during private testing at Paul Ricard — a great example of a conventional rear setup, anti-roll bar included.
• The Lotus 18, the last Colin Chapman design with conventional front suspension, where you can clearly see how exposed the rear damper and spring are, sitting right in the airflow — an aerodynamic problem engineers would soon try to fix.

3. Rocker suspension: hiding the mechanics

Here, the upper wishbone becomes a rigid rocking lever pivoting on an axis, while the spring moves inside the chassis. When the wheel rises, the wishbone pivots like a seesaw and compresses the spring, now tucked closer to the car's centre.

Two standout examples in the video: the Lotus 91 driven by Nigel Mansell — Colin Chapman's final Lotus design, and the team's last-ever win — and an early-80s Fittipaldi driven by Keke Rosberg. The benefit: centralising mass in the chassis. The very real downside: last-minute setup changes became a nightmare for mechanics to access.

4. Pushrod suspension

Invented in the early 80s by Gordon Murray on a Brabham BMW, and widely adopted through the 90s. A rigid rod, mounted low on the upright, angles up to a rocker at the top of the chassis. As the wheel rises, the rod pushes — hence the name.

The video demonstrates it on an early-90s Jordan: dampers hidden inside the bodywork, narrower front ends, and crucially, the entire underside of the car freed up for aerodynamics. This was the era when every team tried to raise the nose as high as possible to optimise underfloor airflow.

Another key milestone covered: the Williams FW14B driven by Nigel Mansell, which paired pushrod suspension with active suspension — a system capable of adjusting ride height in real time based on a pre-programmed computer model. Devastatingly effective, but deemed too complex and too costly: the FIA banned it in 1994, partly over fears of a software glitch mid-corner at full speed.

5. Pull-rod suspension

The exact geometric inverse of the pushrod. The rod starts at the top of the upright and angles down toward the bottom of the chassis. The motion is counter-intuitive: as the wheel rises, the rigid rod pulls — rather than pushes — on a rocker mounted at the floor, which decompresses dampers tucked right at the bottom of the car.

To illustrate it, the video zooms in on a rare gem: a 1982 Tyrrell 011, driven by Michele Alboreto — a rear pull-rod setup, far less common than a front one at the time. The benefit: a lower centre of gravity, thanks to a shallower rod angle. The downside: that shallower angle demands stronger materials to handle the extra load, and adjustments buried at the bottom of the car are far harder to reach.

Pushrod or pull-rod: which one wins today?

The video's verdict: there's no outright winner. It all comes down to the car's overall philosophy. To prove it, two modern cars face off on camera: a 2020 Mercedes running front pushrod suspension, and a 2022 Red Bull that went with pull-rods instead.

Pushrod: leans toward aerodynamics and underfloor airflow. Pull-rod: leans toward a lower centre of gravity. And the FIA still has the final say — through ground-effect rules, minimum nose height regulations, or the limited parc fermé time mechanics get for setup changes, where a pushrod remains far more accessible than a pull-rod.

A history lesson in the metal

What stands out in this video is seeing 75 years of engineering research lined up side by side, on the very ground where it all began. An extraordinary lineup that will likely never be recreated at this scale again.

Every photo taken on site — the Maserati 250F, the Lotus 91, the Tyrrell 011, and the rest of the collection — is available exclusively on our Instagram, along with behind-the-scenes shots from filming at Silverstone.

Watch the full video

This recap can't do justice to the car-by-car technical detail shown on screen. To see every mechanism in action, close-ups included, head over to the full video on the Live4Racing YouTube channel. Subscribe while you're there — it genuinely helps us keep making this kind of content.

And to catch everything else we're covering — exclusive photos, live paddock stories, behind-the-scenes — follow us on Instagram. All our coverage is also centralised at live4racing.com.

Tags: Formula 1, F1 Suspension, Silverstone Festival, Colin Chapman, Juan Manuel Fangio, Elio de Angelis, Gordon Murray, Williams FW14B, Tyrrell 011, Nigel Mansell, pushrod suspension, pull-rod suspension, historic motorsport, Live4Racing