Eric Broadley
Founder of Lola Cars who built it into the world’s largest commercial racing car manufacturer
ERIC BROADLEY, who has died aged 88, was the founder of Lola Cars, the Huntingdonbased racing car manufacturer which was widely successful in various categories, including Formula 5000, which they dominated for many years.
Broadley, a former quantity surveyor, founded his company out of a workshop in West Byfleet, Surrey, and over the years Lola became one of the world’s most successful production race car manufacturers.
The company’s biggest successes came in America where Lola notched up an astonishing 181 individual Indy or Champcar victories, including three Indy 500s, as well as eleven CART or Champcar titles and seven consecutive Formula 5000 and Can-am championships. Graham Hill, Mario Andretti, Bobby Rahal, Al Unser Jr, Cristiano da Matta, Nigel Mansell, Paul Tracy and Michael Andretti all took CART and Champcar titles in Lola chassis.
Broadley was also largely responsible for Ford’s renowned GT40. It was built in response to Ferrari’s dominance at the Le Mans 24 Hours from 1960 to 1965, but was based on Broadley’s Lola Mk6 GT which had caused a sensation when the prototype made its debut at the Racing Car Show in 1963. Ford engaged Broadley as a consultant and he built the early Ford GTS in Lola’s Slough workshops. In 1966 GT40S took the first three places at Le Mans and followed up with an impressive string of victories in the same event in the following three years.
Broadley also had great success in the 1960s with the Lola T70, of which over 100 would be produced in open top (Spider) and coupé form with championship wins in Can-am, courtesy of John Surtees, in 1966, and a win for Penske’s Chevrolet-powered T70 in a Lola 1/2 at the 1969 24 Hours of Daytona.
In 1971 the Steve Mcqueen film Le Mans featured about a dozen Lolas – most of which were dressed up as other, better known, marques, including Porsche and Ferrari. By the beginning of the 1990s Lola had become the world’s largest commercial racing car manufacturer, in just about every formula.
Its record in Formula 1, however, was patchy. A Broadley-designed Lola 4 made its debut in 1962 with Reg Parnell’s Bowmaker team of John Surtees and Roy Salvadori. In 1967 Surtees drove a Honda based on a Lola design to victory at Monza.
In 1974 Broadley designed and built cars for Graham Hill’s Embassy Hill team, and from the late 1980s provided F1 chassis to Gérard Larrousse’s team for some five seasons, using Cosworth and Lamborghini engines. In 1993 he joined forces with Scuderia Italia to produce the Ferrari V12-powered T93/30, but the relationship ended in acrimony after the cars failed to qualify on a number of occasions. Despite this setback and after several financial ups and downs, Broadley decided that to survive Lola Cars would either have to make a road car or get into Formula 1 on its own account. His plans for a Lola factory F1 team in 1997, however, turned out to be a disaster.
After almost no testing, the cars went to the opening round in Melbourne, but Lola’s drivers Vincenzo Sospiri and Ricardo Rosset were more than 11 seconds a lap off the pace. They went to the next round in Brazil, only to be called home when a sponsorship deal fell through. The F1 operation owed £6 million, and a few weeks later Lola Cars was in administration.
While Lola was subsequently turned round and enjoyed further successes under a new chairman, Martin Birrane, a former customer who retained a friendly personal relationship with his predecessor, Broadley’s direct association with the company he founded was at an end.
Eric Broadley was born on September 22 1928 and trained as an architect in the late 1940s. After completing his studies he took a job as a quantity surveyor, but found the work “deadly boring”. Inspired by a cousin who had built an Austin 7 Special, he decided to build a 1172cc Ford-engine “Broadley Special” for the “Ford Ten Special” class using home-made and proprietary parts. For reasons which remain unclear, he christened the car Lola, and with Broadley at the wheel it was unbeaten in its class during 1957, winning the Colin Chapman Trophy.
In 1958 the cousins built a Climaxengined 1100cc sports car, based on a modified Lotus 11 chassis, with which Broadley became the first man ever to lap the Brands Hatch Indy circuit in under one minute. After crashing the car during an outing at Goodwood, his employers, unimpressed when he turned up for work covered in cuts and bruises, told him he had to make up his mind between the job and motor racing. “I thought, well, we might as well have some fun,” Broadley recalled. “I can always get another job if it doesn’t work out.”
Using his £2,000 savings, Broadley founded Lola Cars, and the Lola Mk 1, based on his 1100 sports car, went on the market. In the end around 40 Mk 1s were built. There were class wins at Sebring and in the Nürburgring 1000 kms, while at Le Mans the Peter Ashdown/charles Vögele Lola ran strongly for 19 hours until the engine failed. The company designed its first single-seater, a Formula Junior, in 1960.
His early cars were built in a workshop in West Byfleet and later in a garage behind the family gentlemen’s outfitters business in Bromley. By 1963 Lola were based at premises in Slough. In 1971 they moved to Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire.
In an interview with Motorsport in 2008, Broadley reflected on Lola’s ups and downs: “We were in too much, really. When you look at it all in retrospect, you realise all the mistakes you’ve made over the years. You look at a project and realise what you should have done. I always remember the things that didn’t work so well, and forget the successes.”
Broadley was involved in various projects after Lola, but mainly enjoyed retirement at his farmhouse in the village of Broughton, near Huntingdon, from which he would occasionally venture out to visit the Lola workshops and talk to old friends. In 2008, to mark the company’s 50th birthday, John Surtees drove a Lola T70 MKIIIB around the streets of Huntingdon with Broadley in the passenger seat.
In 2012, however, Lola Cars fell victim to the world recession and called in the administrators.
Broadley was appointed MBE in 1991.
He is survived by his wife Julia and by two daughters and a son.
Eric Broadley, born September 22 1928, died May 28 2017