Eric Broadley 1928-2017
John Simister pays tribute to the quiet genius behind Lola – and Ford’s legendary Le Mans wins
ERIC BROADLEY MBE, the quietly determined genius who founded Lola Cars in a tiny workshop in Bromley, Kent, in 1958, has died aged 88. His company became one of the UK’s most prolific manufacturers of racewinning machinery during four decades, with more than 2000 Lolas produced to compete in almost every category of serious motor racing.
Broadley’s machines won the Indianapolis 500 and the Can-Am series, and they dominated Formula 5000 for years. His designs and innovations were very influential; famously it was from a Broadley design – the Mk6 – that Ford’s GT40 emerged.
Less obviously, Broadley also had a good business head. Talent is needed to design a winning car, but it is perhaps even harder to create a profitable enterprise in the volatile world of racing car manufacture, where winning is everything.
Inevitably, Broadley had his ups and downs, the latter mostly from his attempts to break into Formula 1. He was drawn to it because that’s where the big money seemed to be, but Lola’s forays into F1 seemed eternally dogged by misfortune. He had moved into single-seaters early on, his first mid-engined car being the 1961 Mk3 Formula Junior, followed in 1962 by a Climax V8-engined Formula 1 car backed by Bowmaker. That project died when Bowmaker pulled out of motor racing abruptly in January 1963.
Bowmaker’s withdrawal killed off the first Lola works F1 team but it was another big business decision, this time by the American Ford Motor Company, that shaped Lola’s immediate future later that year. The Mk6 GT prototype was destined never to become the road car it was intended to be, but it altered Broadley’s career in unexpected ways. The GT’s fabulous appearance was the sensation of the Racing Car Show in January 1963, with an inspired new chassis design, light and very stiff, beneath the slippery curves.
The Lola GT had the potential to take on Ferrari and win many races in 1963, including the Le Mans 24 Hours, but neither luck nor proper funding were forthcoming. Meanwhile, Ford was keen to take on Ferrari at Le Mans without delay. When the Mk6 GT showed promise at Le Mans in the hands of Richard Attwood and David Hobbs, Ford immediately offered Broadley a two-year contract that would take his services and everything to do with Lola Cars, exclusively and completely, into the Ford GT works programme.
Thus the Mk6 formed the basis of the original GT40 and, eventually, the famous Le Mans victories. However, after creative differences with Ford over the direction the GT40 should go, Broadley ended Lola’s relationship with Ford after just one year – even though he had already moved his business to Slough, adjacent to Ford’s Advanced Vehicles operation.
So he picked up where he had left off, designing, building and selling racing cars. Success soon came: Graham Hill won the 1966 Indianapolis 500 in a Lola run by Mecom Racing and, in the same year, John Surtees won the first Can-Am Championship with his Lola T70-Chevrolet.
In later years, Broadley moved the company to bigger premises in Huntingdon and continued to run it right up to 1999, when he sold out to Martin Birrane. When interviewed by Tony Dron (Octane 123) and asked if it were true that Ford’s engineers didn’t really know how to do the GT40’s suspension calculations, Broadley took a long, long pause before replying: ‘Basically… yes.’