Epic fail: the Ligier JS5 F1 car's 'teapot' airbox

The problem with F1 cars today is, they’re so ugly. All those slats and fins and petrochemical sponsor logos: it’s not like the good old days, when every Grand Prix racer was a sleek, sinuous slice of pure (tobacco branded) beauty.

Only, they weren’t, were they? Sure, the good old days did contain some very pretty F1 cars – when Epic Fail is sad, Epic Fail spends a while looking at photos of the Lotus 72, which tends to help matters – but they also contained a whole bunch of utter horror shows.

Such as Ligier’s JS5, the 1976 F1 entrant that sported an airbox so bulbous it was christened ‘The Teapot’. Consider it an automotive Rorschach test: what do you see in that curvaceous funnel? Smurf hat? Squid Game guard? The exit hole of a marsupial?

Quite why the Ligier JS5’s extraordinary protuberance was quite so extraordinarily protuberant remains unclear. Its primary purpose was to funnel cool air to the Ligier’s 3.0-litre Matra V12, but other teams of the era achieved the same effect with airboxes that didn’t look like haunted sculptures from an especially creepy kids’ theme park.

The JS5 may have been ugly as a fungal toenail, but it wasn’t slow. Though it retired early on its first two outings – perhaps out of sympathy for the eyes of onlookers – the Teapot then recorded a fourth place at Long Beach, California, in the hands of French racer Jacques Lafitte, who at least had the benefit of not having to look at the mega snout.

But a flower blooms only for a season. After just four races, as F1 tweaked the regulations to prevent any airbox extending beyond the roll hoop, the JS5 was revised to resemble a regular racecar. We have never witnessed the Teapot’s like since, and for that we must all be thankful.