Lotus: Its route to iconic status
It started behind a pub
Colin Chapman is often described as Britain’s Enzo Ferrari, having founded a revered Formula 1 team and road carmaker. He built his first Lotus-badged car, the Mk 1, by hand in a yard behind his father’s North London pub. He established Lotus as a company in 1952, aged 24, with a loan from his fiancee, and began building racing cars to sell. In 1966, Lotus moved to a disused Second World War air base at Hethel in Norfolk, and it has been there ever since.
Beats Ferrari to 50 F1 wins
Lotus first raced in Formula 1 in 1958. It beat mighty Ferrari to be the first team to win 50 Grands Prix, despite the Italians having celebrated their first victory in 1951, nine years before Stirling Moss gave Lotus its maiden triumph at Monaco in 1960. Team Lotus was hugely influential and innovative in Formula 1. It pioneered tobacco sponsorship with its iconic, much-loved black and gold John Player Special livery, and gave Ayrton Senna his first Grand Prix win.
British double world champion Jim Clark was killed in a Lotus F2 car in 1968, while Nigel Mansell later drove for the team.
By the time it ceased racing in 1994, Lotus had won seven constructors’ titles, six drivers’ championships, and the Indy 500: a remarkable record.
What’s in a name?
Colin Chapman never revealed why he named his car company after the national flower of India, associated in Hinduism and Buddhism with purity and beauty. Some people say he was aware of these associations, while others claim his pet name for his wife Hazel was ‘Lotus blossom’. Lotus’s poor reputation for quality led some to joke it stands for ‘Lots of trouble, usually serious’.
In Seven heaven
The Lotus Seven was the firm’s first road car. Unveiled in 1957, it has been in continuous production for 61 years, the design having been passed to Caterham in the 1970s. The lightweight, minimalist roadster famously provided transport for Patrick McGoohan in the cult TV series The Prisoner, and still offers huge performance and sharp handling despite its antiquated styling.
Back in the 1960s, the rules stated it would only qualify for the then kit-car tax break if assembly instructions were not included, so Chapman included disassembly instructions instead, which buyers simply had to follow backwards.
The ultimate movie star
The Esprit was one of the iconic supercars of the 1970s and 1980s, and featured in two Bond movies. In 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore famously turned his
white Esprit into a submarine at the flick of a switch. Tesla’s billionaire owner Elon Musk now owns that car and plans to return it to the water. The Esprit also starred in Basic Instinct and Pretty Woman.
Fall from grace
Colin Chapman died of a heart attack in 1982, avoiding almost certain conviction and imprisonment for the disappearance of about £5 million of Government subsidies given to DeLorean, maker of the sports car most famous for its appearance in Back To The Future, and which Lotus helped to design. Only Chapman’s finance chief Fred Bushell was convicted, receiving a three-year sentence for what the judge said was a ‘bare-faced, outrageous and massive fraud’.
The judge added that if Chapman had lived, he would have been given ten years in jail.
Badge of honour
Lotus has been asked to apply its brilliant, inventive engineering to a bizarre range of projects for other companies – everything from the DeLorean to the Sinclair C5 to Chris Boardman’s Lotus track bike, on which he won gold at the 1992 Olympics. It has also improved on cars from other makers and put its own badge on them, such as the Lotus Cortina and the Lotus Carlton, both of which are now highly collectable.