THE HISTORY OF LOTUS
THE HISTORY OF LOTUS Cast in the mould of its founder Colin Chapman, Lotus was powerful and daring but flawed – as it proved through further soaring peaks and painful troughs into the 1980s PART 4: 1977-84
The last hurrah: part 4 of our series on Team Lotus
When Niki Lauda first visited Fiorano he expressed surprise that Ferrari didn’t win all the time, such were the obvious advantages at its disposal. The sentiment fits 1970s Team Lotus too, except it was people, not just its own cutting-edge facilities, that lent ‘Britain’s Ferrari’ its true potency. First, no team had a force to match Colin Chapman: founder, visionary, pioneer, an inspirational and totemic leader on a never-ceasing quest to discover the next big thing. Then there was his fully-loaded workforce, a talented band of bluff designers, engineers and mechanics – all motor racing lifers – who were pulled along by his example, putting in (and putting up with) the endless string of all-nighters. Lotus was F1’s school of excellence and hard knocks, a mirror image of Chapman himself. Which inevitably meant it was also flawed. There was good reason why Lotus didn’t win as much as it should have.
The distractions and technical cul-de-sacs that had coloured the late 1960s and the brashly commercial decade that followed only intensified at Lotus as the age of the manufacturer superpowers dawned. Chapman and his intrepid band infuriated, slumping into the realms of
mediocrity they had worked so hard to pull out from in the mid-1970s. But there was still time for one final gilt-edged black-and-gold season in F1’s sun-drenched uplands.
In the moment it was darkest before the dawn, the summer of 1975, Chapman presented to his troops the route back to the light in a 27-page concept document of what he wanted next. It didn’t have all the answers – quite the opposite. Instead, big questions were charged for Tony Rudd, head of his research and development team, to resolve from a new base in a grand old Norfolk manor, Ketteringham Hall. Rudd, for so long a rival at BRM, had switched sides in 1969 but was employed within the empire and away from F1. Now in harness with designer Ralph Bellamy and aero specialist Peter Wright, Rudd followed Chapman in a direction than would leave
Team Lotus sucking in the ’70s – in a good way.
Rudd and Wright had developed a ‘wing car’ concept together way back at BRM. Ground effects, to use a car’s entire form to create aerodynamic suction rather than rely on inverted wings to source downforce for a payment in drag, was far from new. But it needed Chapman to trigger the revolution that would change F1 forever. First, an extensive windtunnel programme experimented with the theory, shape and form, before Bellamy drew a car for Wright to mould into slippery existence. Layouts finalised, Martin Ogilvie devised the suspension and moving-part details as the band came together to create the Type 78. The ‘Team’ in Team Lotus had never been so apt.
A year on from Chapman’s concept document, a prototype was ready to test for a fully tuned-in
Mario Andretti and his likeable Swedish teammate Gunnar Nilsson, and the wraps were formally removed on what was officially the John Player Special MKIII on 21 December 1976. OK, on shock factor it was no six-wheeled Tyrrell – but it was far more significant.
The slim monocoque carried echoes of the Type 77 that had begun the Lotus revival in 1976, but the broad pannier full-length sidepods were the visual indicator of the new direction. Out of sight, an inverted aerofoil section beneath the water radiators in those long sidepods channelled airflow, with potential spillage sealed by skirts that brushed the ground to form a depression beneath the car and suck it to the track.
The surface-level wings were only to add trim. The faster the 78 went, the more it sucked – and the more it stuck.
Andretti loved it. His contribution included a USAC Indycar-style rear anti-rollbar and with the added means of controlling the drain of three fuel cells to maintain weight bias and good handling over the course of a race. The technically adept American revelled in trimming out the car as he went along. No wonder this was Chapman’s best driver relationship since Jim Clark. These two spoke the same language.
The upshot was a 1977 season that confirmed the Team Lotus revival, even if Andretti fell short of beating Lauda’s Ferrari to the title. But Mario led more laps than anyone and scored four grand prix wins, one more than both Lauda and points runner-up Jody Scheckter in the new Wolf. Nilsson added another, his only F1 victory, at Zolder. The problem was engine reliability as Cosworth worked overtime to squeeze more from the DFV V8, which was beginning to wheeze in the face of Ferrari’s flat-12. But the revolution was only at a canter in 1977: it would accelerate to full gallop in 1978 as ‘Black Beauty’ hit its stride.
Has there ever been an F1 car more perfect in form than the Lotus 79? From the moment it rolled out, shorn of JPS stickers at Silverstone’s International Trophy, the car was an Event
– a game-changer that upped the ante. Its predecessor lost 25% of the aero effect discovered in those early wind tunnel models; the 79 clawed it back and then some thanks to the fully realised ground effect that sucked away beneath those elegant sidepods. Now the venturis extended all the way back and, with the fuel packaged more compactly in one cell behind the driver
BUT THE REVOLUTION WAS ONLY AT A CANTER IN 1977: IT WOULD ACCELERATE TO FULL GALLOP IN 1978 AS ‘BLACK BEAUTY’ HIT ITS STRIDE
and tougher skirts further sealing the deal, the 79 hoovered up wins. But it wasn’t perfect. The chassis wasn’t stiff enough for all that downforce and its porous magnesium calipers often led to a soft brake pedal as the laps ticked by.
But hey, Andretti and new team-mate Ronnie Peterson could hardly complain too much during a halcyon 1978. Yes, ‘Superswede’ was back where he belonged after largely wasted years at March and Tyrrell, replacing poor Nilsson who was now battling the cancer that would eventually take his life. Andretti was nervous about another ‘alpha’ driver joining him after all the hard work he’d put in – but the pair quickly became firm friends. Just to be sure, Mario asserted his number one status and tension seeped into his relationship with Chapman – but how could you get mad at Ronnie? After Andretti aquaplaned out of the 79’s debut at a drenched Silverstone International Trophy, he and Peterson embarked on a glittering season as the black-and-gold train steamed through the world championship races. The car racked up eight wins, six of them in Andretti’s hands, with four team 1-2s as Lotus swept to its seventh constructors’ title (hard to imagine then it would be the last). If anything, the results underplayed the 79’s superiority, although it might have been different had Gordon Murray’s Brabham BT46B fan car not been set aside on Bernie Ecclestone’s order following its landmark debut win at Anderstorp. Had it been Chapman’s, no way would he have backed down – but from the start Ecclestone always was looking beyond Brabham and at the much bigger picture.
Chapman’s vision, and the expertise of those behind him, had paid off so beautifully – but that only made the horrible twist at Monza all the more devastating. A scandalously chaotic start and the funnel effect of Monza’s new firstcorner chicane led to a pile-up in which Peterson sustained severe leg injuries. Still, he’d been rescued from the blazing wreck by fellow drivers and was on his way to hospital, so Andretti took the restart, jumped it by a mile, won the race
– and was then docked 60 seconds. It didn’t matter. Ronnie had been his only title challenger and in strange, subdued circumstances Mario had landed his life’s ambition. Then, during the night, Peterson’s condition took a turn for the worse as an embolism set in. Unfathomably, he slipped away the following morning. There were unnerving Monza parallels: not only Jochen Rindt in 1970, more spookily how Phil Hill had become America’s first grief-stricken world champion in 1961 on a day when his Ferrari team-mate Wolfgang von Trips and 14 spectators had died after a collision with Jim Clark. If you believed in such things, Lotus seemed burdened by a Monza curse. More prosaically, this was just reality in the cruel and violent sport of motor racing.
While lives existed on a knife-edge in F1 back then, so too, as it turned out, did form. How Chapman and Team Lotus blew their advantage so heinously in 1979 still beggars belief. But the Old Man, as was his wont, chewed off too much in his ambition to press on. The theory behind the Lotus 80 is logical, inspired and tantalising in its genius. But like the 4WD 63 and turbine-powered 56B, it failed. Horribly. From the ‘wing car’, Chapman, Rudd, Wright and Ogilvie evolved their concept to create the ‘wingless wonder’ for the ultimate trade-off in massive downforce for bareminimum drag. The design, presented in a return to British Racing Green mixed with Martini’s stripes, was other-worldly and striking beyond
THE CAR RACKED UP EIGHT WINS. IF ANYTHING, THE RESULTS UNDERPLAYED THE 79’S SUPERIORITY
anything yet seen. Oh, if only it had worked.
The venturis now ran through the long wingless nose and all the way back beyond the rear axle, sealed by full-length skirts from tip to tail. If Andretti had described the 78 as “painted to the road”, what shade of downforce was he about to uncover? Something far too garish for its elegant colours, as it turned out. At high speed, the car sucked the road too much, its area of low pressure moving along the centre of gravity, creating squat, then lift – an unnerving instability known as porpoising. At slow speed the 80 was worse, picking up then losing its downforce through the turns in a manner that made it undrivable – so much that Andretti’s new team-mate Carlos Reutemann point-blank refused to even try. Mario made three starts in the 80, somehow coaxing it to third place on its debut in Spain (but behind Reutemann’s 79), then called enough. Not for the first time, Chapman reversed from his cul-de-sac as Williams emerged as the ‘new Lotus’ with an FW07 that tech director Patrick Head
openly admitted was a well-engineered 79 copy: the car the Lotus 80 should have been.
Andretti lasted one final year before his patience with Lotus ran dry. You only have to look at the type 81 of 1980 to understand why. The smart blue, red and chrome of new sponsor Essex Petroleum couldn’t hide its hideous bulk. The season was another disaster. Within two years of ‘Black Beauty’ superiority, Lotus had become something of an F1 joke, not helped by Chapman’s ill-starred faith in Essex boss David Thieme, a sponsor relationship that began with a lavish launch at the Paradis Latin night club in Paris where the 81 was lowered dramatically from the ceiling. New distractions.
But that didn’t mean the fire wasn’t still lit. The Lotus 88 proved that, Chapman’s final great experiment that didn’t as such fail to fly – rather, it was thwarted from ever leaving the ground. Its twin-chassis concept was devised to combat the stiff suspension required for ground effects that made driving this generation so demanding
and lethal. The 88 allowed for an ‘inner’ chassis to be softly sprung, while the ‘outer’ or ‘primary’ chassis lowered towards the track at speed. Amidst the cacophony of the FISA/FOCA war that raged through 1981, Chapman’s next big thing was a political casualty (although would it ever really have worked? Like his other misfires, it was too complex). The 88 was banned from competing at its first two races on the grounds that the second chassis was effectively a full-length sprung, and therefore movable, aerodynamic device. When it failed scrutineering for a third time, in Argentina, Chapman flew home in a fury. He tried again with a B-spec version at the British GP, but again the FIA threw it out, so he dug in and fought on as Team Lotus toiled with the 81B, all the way to an FIA Court of Appeals hearing in November – when he was finally forced to raise the white flag.
A statement released that April offers insight into Chapman’s increasing disenchantment with F1. “I shall seriously reconsider… whether grand prix racing is still what it purports to be: the pinnacle of sport and technological achievement,” it read. “Unfortunately, this appears to be no longer the case and, if one does not clean it up, F1 shall end up in a quagmire of plagiarism, chicanery and petty rule interpretation forced by lobbies manipulated by people for whom the sport has no meaning.” Ring a bell?
Then suddenly, on 16 December 1982, Chapman was gone, struck down by a massive heart attack. He’d looked much older than his 54 years. Perhaps he’d finally paid the price for those all-nighters. His death left a vacuum in F1 that was and never has been filled, and robbed Lotus of its life-force. Then there were the dangling question marks that could never be resolved. What had been the nature of his relationship and dealings with John Delorean? Was that High Court judge correct in saying Chapman would have tasted Porridge in the wake of a financial scandal involving UK government money? What about the far-fetched theory that he was in so deep, he’d faked his own death? The complexity of Chapman’s technical drive was mirrored not only in Lotus but in his whole personality.
Peter Warr, long-serving lieutenant, picked up the pieces as Team Lotus plugged away. It’s fitting that on the day Chapman died F3 racer Dave Scott was testing a Lotus at Snetterton fitted with a new big idea: active suspension. Lotus pioneered the next big thing, even if it would be Williams that perfected it, just as it had ground effects.
In alliance with Elio de Angelis, a wealthy, charming, young Marlon Brando lookalike who perhaps lacked the application to match his natural talent, Lotus still had its good days – including the last victory Chapman witnessed (and the first for four years) when Elio beat Keke Rosberg’s Williams to the line by 0.05s at the Österreichring in 1982.
Then there was Nigel Mansell. Warr and others within Lotus always dismissed a man they labelled a whinger with an inflated view of his own talent, even after he became a winner at Williams. The mentor relationship with Chapman has perhaps been over-egged, although it’s clear the Old Man saw something that would flower much later – and he always did want to find another Jim Clark. Mansell was brave – not even Warr could deny that – and his nationality prolonged his time at Lotus thanks to JPS, which had returned in the wake of the Essex farrago. But while there were nuggets that showed his potential, the lasting memory of Mansell in a Lotus is of him slithering on that white line at Massenet and smacking the Armco at Monaco 1984 – the last straw for Warr.
Instead, Lotus looked to a promising Brazilian in a vivid yellow helmet to inject a final dose of magic into its flagging odyssey. It wasn’t the same without the Old Man, of course. How could it be? But imagine the fireworks: Colin Chapman would have loved Ayrton Senna.
IT WASN’T THE SAME WITHOUT THE OLD MAN, OF COURSE. HOW COULD IT BE?