'77 was the first of the Ground Effect years, but that was mainly limited to Lotus (the rest of the field didn’t really catch on to that until '79). Looking back at a handful of races though, quali times seemed to drop 1-2 seconds between '76 and '77 so there might have been something else going on at the same time (tyre development etc) as most teams used the same or similar cars for both seasons.
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Aero changes were pretty big as well. Reading the wiki on the RS01, there had been a metric ton of development that went in to that car in '77 and '78 to the point where it didn’t even look the same by the end of '78. One of the big changes by '78 was the change to twin turbos instead of a large single turbo.
'79 was the introduction of the RS10 and was the culmination of all of the development of the RS01. Personally I would have rather seen the RS10, as it was the first car to win in F1 for Renault. The RS01 was horribly unreliable the first season.
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The fun of watching F1 in the early turbo era was seeing how much of a lead the Renaults would develop before grenading in flames. Only on the fast tracks though. In those days there were distinctly different tracks: fast, medium and slow, and not many cars were good on all three, so the racing seemed less predictable. Rallying was similar, with Renault specialising on the tarmac events like the Tour de Corse. Ah, nostalgia! Ain’t wot it was…
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