How an icon was born
Richard Hill is chief aerodynamicist at Lotus and designed both the 1992 Olympic gold-winning Lotus 108 and the roadgoing Lotus 110, on which Boardman rode the fastest ever average speed in a Tour de France time trial in 1994, a record that stood for 21 years. At Brands Hatch he chose to station himself at the Lotus 110 gazebo rather than with any of the Lotus car clubs, saying he was “here for the bikes” and that he found it “staggering, gratifying and bemusing that it still has this level of interest”. Why does he think this is?
“I guess half the thing is it doesn’t look old; it doesn’t look dated. Because all the rules have changed and there isn’t anything on the market that looks anything like it.”
Hill recalls how the original pursuit bike for Chris Boardman had been “a six-month project from December '91 to summer '92, Barcelona. Literally it was, ‘We’ll go for it,’ so it was six months of weekends and evenings. It was a fairly tight programme and obviously very successful so we thought, well what do we do with it from here? It had been a PR exercise really to show off what we do in engineering and it did exactly what it was intended to do — drew a lot of interest.”
In 1993 Hill started designing a roadgoing Lotus bike that Boardman and the GAN team could use in the Tour de France.
“The 108 was designed to be as thin as possible. It had a monoblade, the rear wheel was offset by 16mm and tucked into the rear chainstay and it was designed to be a track bike purely for the velodrome.
“The 110 was obviously for the road, designed for a standard groupset so that anybody could put any equipment on it. It wasn’t designed to be the lightest bike as it was aimed at the time triallists where you don’t need ultimate low weight, you just need good efficiency once you’re up to speed and it was designed to have a degree of compliance.
“It had to have forks and chainstays to accommodate standard wheels but then we went for the cantilever chainstays for a bit of suspension — designed to flex plus or minus 2mm. We didn’t need the same level of rigidity and it almost twists so that when you’re in a rhythm the bottom bracket flexing from side to side actually aids the motion of the rider and bike.
“It was designed to be less torsionally stiff than the 108, to have more compliance vertically and to take a standard groupset and to have an adjustable seatpost. It was a bike that was designed to be used by anybody, rather than the 108 which was very specifically designed around Chris. That was one bike designed for one man for one race. The 110 was for anybody.”