Lotus's Colin Chapman had already experimented with ground-effect principles the previous year, in the Lotus 78, but it was the Lotus 79 — introduced partway through the 1978 season, with its Zolder debut its first race appearance — that fully realised the idea. The car's sidepods were shaped as inverted wings, using the airflow beneath the car to generate a low-pressure zone that effectively pulled the entire chassis down onto the track, dramatically increasing the cornering grip available without the drag penalty of conventional wings mounted in the airflow above the car. Sliding skirts along the car's sides sealed the low-pressure area from outside air, preserving the effect.
The result, when Mario Andretti took the Lotus 79 to victory on its debut at Zolder, was immediately and visibly different from anything else on the grid — the car appeared to simply corner faster than physics seemed to allow, carrying speed through bends that other cars needed to brake for, and doing so with a poise that made the rest of the field look, by comparison, like they were driving on a different surface entirely. Andretti and teammate Ronnie Peterson would dominate much of the remainder of the season in the 79, with Andretti clinching the World Championship before the year was out, in a title campaign overshadowed by Peterson's fatal accident at the Italian Grand Prix in September.
The 79's success triggered an aerodynamic arms race that defined Formula 1 for the next several seasons — every competitive team scrambled to develop their own ground-effect designs, chasing the same underbody-suction principle Chapman's team had proven, in a technical direction that pushed cornering speeds to levels the sport's circuits and safety provisions of the era were not always well equipped to handle. That same escalating cornering-speed problem would eventually force governing bodies to ban the technology outright in 1983, ending an era the Lotus 79 had single-handedly started at Zolder five years earlier.