The incredible rise and fall of Team Lotus

The new 1.5-litre formula of 1961 brought two more victories for the Walker 18, the product of pure Moss virtuosity in a season dominated by Ferrari. “I didn’t think I stood a chance at Monaco,” he remembers, “and even quite a long way into the race I still thought the Ferraris were just playing with me.” In his inspired efforts to pass and pull clear of Richie Ginther’s Ferrari he lapped almost 3sec faster than his pole position time. Aided by some soft compound green spot Dunlops he was similarly stunning when winning at the Nürburgring.

In the final race of that year, in the absence of the Ferraris, Innes Ireland gave the works team its first victory and his one and only championship Grand Prix win. It was achieved in the 21, a more aerodynamic development of the 18 with a canted engine and inboard suspension. It was just reward after four years of toil by the Lotus mechanics, as former spanner chief Jim Endruweit recalls: “It wasn’t a terribly happy outfit in the early days. We reckoned we put in more hours than any other team. The norm was to work all through the night before going to a meeting, drive the truck across there, go straight into practice and if you were lucky, get to bed as early as 2am. When nothing good comes out of it you get despondent. But when you start winning, it’s ‘wow’, a total transformation.”

Warr recalls: ‘The whole Lotus philosophy, and it ran throughout the team, was that nothing was too difficult to achieve. If you worked in close proximity to Chapman you could not fail to get caught up in that.”

Despite his win, Chapman sacked Ireland weeks later, before the 1962 season kicked off, leaving the young Jim Clark as team leader. Clark had made his F1 debut in 1960, just six months after first stepping into his first single-seater. By ’61 he was making Moss nervous and had formed a symbiotic working relationship with Chapman. With what the boss had stuffed up his sleeve for 1962, motor racing’s most celebrated partnership to date was about to enter its golden era.

The beautiful, epoch-making Lotus 25 stands as one of the greatest designs of all time, bringing monocoque construction to Formula 1. The construction’s torsional stiffness allowed its suspension to work better than that of its rivals; it offered the driver far greater accident protection than the spaceframe, torsional stiffness three times greater than that of the 21 and a chassis that was half the weight.

Costin remembers: “We used to go to Waltham Cross for lunch and he outlined it to us there on a napkin.” Read recalls that Chapman’s original motivation came from his frantic search for a way of lowering the frontal area by doing away with the space-consuming tubes and “getting rid of the awful tanking arrangements of a spaceframe chassis which were not only extremely complicated but also prone to leaks.”

For the perfectionist Chapman all that remained was to tailor the car as tightly as possible to Clark’s compact dimensions, and recline him to 35 degrees to lower further the frontal area. He boasted that even the brake lines passed through a channel in the floor which ran “between Jimmy’s cheeks”. In cross section the frontal area was 0.37 square metres compared to 0.54 for the ’62 Ferrari or 0.45 for the BRM.

Although the monocoque idea wasn’t new it was common in aircraft construction – Chapman utilised it perfectly. “I don’t think he ever invented anything,” says French journalist and ardent Lotus fan Jabby Crombac. “He would take something which had been invented long before its time and, when the technology allowed it, make it work.”

Although it was soon sufficiently resolved for Rindt to win four successive Grands Prix, the 72 remained a frail car. “At Zandvoort, Jochen spun in practice,” says Miles, “and it bent the monocoque. Thing is, he didn’t hit anything.” A broken brakeshaft combined with Rindt’s refusal to wear crotch straps caused his fatal accident at Monza.

Emerson Fittipaldi helped secure Rindt’s posthumous title by winning in just his fifth Grand Prix appearance, at Watkins Glen. Two years later, still in the 72, he was crowned the sport’s youngest ever world champion at 25. “Chapman was very impressed by his maturity,” remembers Crombac. “Even when he first appeared at that very young age, he looked and acted like a 35 year old man and he was also very intelligent.”

Both Fittipaldi and Ronnie Peterson would score many more wins with the long-running 72, the last coming at Monza in 74. But though it had taken rivals many years to catch up, they were about to leave Lotus behind.

“If Colin had a failing it was that he was always looking for the next thing no-one else had, rather than developing what he had,” asserts Warr. It took three years and the help of aerodynamicist Peter Wright to find it was the Lotus 78, featuring inverted wing profiles inside its wide side pods, which made its debut at the 1977 Argentine Grand Prix. It was the beginning of ground effect.

“The work really started when I was at BRM in the late ’60s with Tony Rudd,” recalls Wright. “We’d started to build a wing car there but it didn’t have skirts and probably wouldn’t have worked very well. With the 78, Chapman asked Tony Rudd to go right back to fundamentals.”

The car originally appeared with brushes rather than skirts. “We were a bit nervous about what we’d be allowed to run,” says Wright. “They didn’t really work… We had a Renault 4 van and we hung stuff on the back of that and ran it round Hethel. The real breakthrough came when we put ceramic tips on the skirts, making them suck down instead of up by sealing all the time.” Thus equipped, the ground-effect 78 was the fastest car of the season, only engine unreliability keeping Mario Andretti from snatching the title away from Lauda’s Ferrari 312T2.

With further refinement, the seminal 79 was created and this time Andretti waltzed to Lotus’ sixth drivers’ and seventh constructors’ world titles. The car left rivals reeling. Gordon Murray, then working for Brabham recalls: “No-one knew exactly what they’d harnessed. We were all still trying to understand it. Chapman was my only hero. Just looking at the cars, I loved the way the guy’s mind worked.”

But it was Murray, together with Williams‘ Patrick Head, who utilised the Lotus principle fully and followed it to its ultimate conclusion. Taking the view that more is better, Lotus attempted, unsuccessfully, to make the whole length of the subsequent 80 generate ground effect. “Williams and Brabham did what we should have done which was build a version of the 79 with a decent structure. Our cars had all the torsional stiffness of a wet lettuce,” says Wright.

He was not to know it but, after the glorious ’78 championship year, Chapman would witness just one more Lotus race win before his sudden death in December ’82 from a heart attack.