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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
Since Codemasters released their version of the B194 in the F1 2020 game, I was grateful to have that resource to be able to check my dimensions and proportions to it, taking nothing from that car at all. Indeed that car is based off one of the current show cars, which Mick Schumacher drove at Spa a few years back, and Damon Hill at Goodwood, but that configuration never actually raced, but is an amalgamation of parts from various races.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
This championship winning car is a cause of much debate and controversy, with many maintaining that it cheated to gain an advantage, whilst everyone involved with the team at the time, even nearly 30 years later, maintain they did not. I'm not going to solve any arguements with this blogpost, but my leaning is towards them not cheating.
Martin Brundle drove his old 1992 Benetton B192 recently at the 2022 Austrian GP weekend, saying he and the team were taking an analogue car to race against the technologically-advanced and well-funded teams in Williams and McLaren. I believe when 'driver-aids' were banned from the 1994 season, the Benetton team were in the best position to adapt to the new regulations. Indeed they spent much of 1993 preparing for this.
The team and Schumacher were working on a very basic and early iteration of a blown diffuser, and whilst Vettel and Red Bull in the 2010 era got Renault to continue to pump out hot exhaust gasses when the driver was off throttle, Schumacher had to learn to do this manually with his foot, and I think it's this odd usage of the throttle that Senna mistakenly confused for traction control, and also why Schumacher had such a large advantage over all three of his team-mates that season.
On that amazing French GP start, Steve Matchett reveals in his book, 'The Mechanic's Tale', reveals that Michael had spent a test day that very week on perfecting his starts, knowing it was a weakness earlier that year. In terms of Option 13, I can understand having working in Software development, that sometimes its easier to not mess with code by deleting huge amounts of it, because it may break the whole thing, so it was easier to just hide it and not use it. In fact Larini admitted Ferrari had used traction control, albeit during practice only, in 1994 and McLaren were fined for using an automated upshift on their car, however they never fined Benetton for traction control deeming that the mechanism was there, but never used.
*** Edit Jan 2023 - A fantastic article, taking input from William Toet ***
The fire at the German GP is well documented, and whilst it was cheating, it is understandable how the Benetton team thought they had legitimate grounds to take the action that they did (removing a part from refueling rig) rather than erring on the side of caution.
I think this car is under-rated because of the cloud that hangs over it, but it was a brilliantly nimble car that with a Ford V8 Cosworth engine, competed and beat the leading Renault V10s and Ferrari V12s. Generally, Schumacher was driving excellently that season, and there were mistakes, especially at the season finale in Adelaide where he had a massive shunt in practice, and then that famous off in the race, and that chop on Damon Hill that cost the Williams driver the championship. But he was unbeatable in the first half of the season, and it took a lot of events that conspired against the German that lead to Hill getting anywhere near the championship battle in the second half of the year. Whilst the Williams ended the season with the better car, in my opinion, and controversy aside, on a pure racing level, this Benetton B194 driven by Schumacher was fully deserving of the 1994 title. They prepared the best for the new regulations, Schumacher was extracting the very best out of the car, having spent years fine tuning it with the team, and I think the 1995 season which they dominated, should have been a repeat of the 1994 on a pure racing level - it was looking this was in the early races.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
So with all that in mind, I wanted especially to do justice with this car, a true legend of the sport, whatever side of the fence you fall on. I'm putting my best techniques learned over the last two decades to do this. With me still using Zmodeler 1 to create my shapes, it still takes time to manually put the car together in a polygon efficient manner, without key curves looking blocky. With having spent a bit more time in Photoshop in the past couple of years, my texture work continues to improve and there is a better mapping relationship between shaping and texturing processes.
To make sure I'm well under GP4's polygon limit, I decided I would not create the engine and keep the gearbox detail to a minimum, sticking with a similar level of detail to the Codemasters version. In the end, this comes to around 55,000 faces, which is by comparison around 10,000 less than my Williams.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
On the shape front, I have opted for more rounded edges on the front and rear wing endplates, as well as the bargeboards. Where there are more curves, I've put more polygons to smooth them more than I have done in previous 1994 cars. To compensate for this increase in detail, I tried to use much less polygons on flat edges, on parts of the nose and the sidepod in particular. For details like screws and bolts, I've opted to shape them separately, mapping them to a larger and more detailed part of the texture, where previously I had painted them in a smaller resolution. This way, you can zoom in and see the detail. There's more detail in the wheel hub assembly than other cars, though the brake pad itself is still borrowed from when I created my 1996 cars. So pumping more energy into areas that you will see is hopefully a better solution than spending lots of time on an engine that you'll very rarely see in-game. For the cockpit, again I wasn't shy in using polygons where I needed to there. This will carry over into the internal cockpit shape. For wing levels, I tried to match the level of downforce with photos from the Australian Grand Prix as reference.
On the texture side, I kept a similar mapping to the original 1994 car by Mckey and Oggo, with a second texture at half the size for various details, and I've created a new carbon texture.
The livery is not that straight forward, and there's curves that passes various seams, so it took a while to get the base livery right. I was able to use a combination of the codemasters car and various photos to make sure the livery is as accurate as possible.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
For the logos, most of them are personally sourced, but I'm grateful to consult with GP4 logo-master Jurgen (Quickslick), to help me find better quality versions of some logos. On that, I ended up creating my own personal Mild Seven (and Benetton non-tobacco equivalent) vector myself. I searched for a long time, the logo on modern cars, on models, on decal sheets, well let's just say I noticed variations from the original car. Also the one on the engine cover, as it's on a slightly slanted surface, it's stretched vertically, as well as arced to fit - so making my own vector logo ensured the quality remained on the logo itself. Again with the text like 'Power By' on the engine cover, and the font on the lower rear wing, I took care to find the best match using a favourite online tool of mine, whatsthefont.com. I've also taken time to distinguish between black parts, carbon parts, and parts that look like a plain black plastic, and amended the alpha channel (reflection management) to suit.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
I'm always trying to improve and push myself to create as accurate a model as I can, without breaking the game when I put it in. Hopefully you can see some of the effort I've put into this model when you run it in game.
My plan is to release this car as a stand alone release first, and then with a couple of variations and other new content in a 1994 mod update at a later date.
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| 1994 Benetton B194 by Fongu |
