The term described the sailing term for the coxswain's station in a Royal Navy ship, and later the location of the ship's rudder controls. Cockpit appeared in the English language in the 1580s, "a pit for fighting cocks," from cock + pit. Used in nautical sense (1706) for midshipmen's compartment below decks; transferred to airplanes (1914) and to cars (1930s). From about 1935 cockpit came to be used informally to refer to the driver's seat of a car, especially a high performance one, and this is official terminology in Formula One.
Taken from Wikipedia.
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