Flashback: Lotus launches its 1990 F1 car with Warwick and Donnelly

It may have been necessary to leave home at some unearthly hour to reach Ketteringham Hall by 10am, but the trip was worth it. Never having been to the legendary headquarters of Team Lotus, here was an invitation that was difficult to decline despite the 200-mile round trip on a dank February day in 1990.

This was at a time when the launch of a Formula 1 car was a proper occasion, not today’s perfunctory five minutes when a team’s latest contender is shoved into a pitlane somewhere for the benefit of photographers before the garage door is slammed shut without so much as a ‘Hello. How are you?’

Derek Warwick, bravely I thought, drove the Lotus 102 along a tree-lined road leading to the Gothic pile. This was the first time the bright yellow car had turned a wheel since completion about half an hour before. We moved inside the Grade II listed building for a chat before adjourning to a marquee on the lawn for lunch.

This was a civilised and fresh start for the former champions. It could hardly have been otherwise after Team Lotus, for the first time in its distinguished history, had failed to qualify either car for the previous year’s Belgian Grand Prix. The stately hall resounded to the sweeping of new brooms.

Gone was Peter Warr, the authoritarian team boss whose links with Lotus had stretched back 30 years. Nelson Piquet and Satoru Nakajima had made way for Warwick and Martin Donnelly. The Judd V8 had been replaced by a Lamborghini V12. Fred Bushell, former chairman and another long-time associate of Colin Chapman, had been detained by the fraud squad over dubious connections with the DeLorean enterprise.
Tony Rudd, whose F1 CV began with BRM in the early 1960s, had become executive chairman of Team Lotus International.

He would be joined in the pitlane by another familiar face as Mauro Forghieri, designer of the Lamborghini V12, took on a new challenge following his days as technical director at Ferrari. The fact that Lamborghini was part of Chrysler, and Group Lotus was owned by General Motors, was dismissed as irrelevant since ‘Team’ was apparently independent of ‘Group’. Anyway, forget the recent past and the politics; Lotus was on the move once more. Or so it seemed.

Lotus would score a meagre three points in 1990, Warwick rolling his car at Monza and Donnelly being fortunate to survive a massive accident due to suspension failure at Jerez. Never mind; it had been a very nice day soaking up a bit of F1 heritage in Norfolk.