Lotus founder Colin Chapman was the F1 team boss, engineer and talisman who pushed design to the limits and changed racing forever – read the Motor Sport profile
Few people have had such a profound impact on their sport as Colin Chapman, the founder of Team Lotus.
Viewed as one of Formula 1’s greatest innovators, the team boss, engineer and car designer’s Lotus outfit won seven constructors’ titles, six drivers’ crowns as well as the Indianapolis 500.
This trophy-laden tenure at the pinnacle of motor sport was driven by a constant creative impetus.
A number of Chapman’s grand prix cars are icons in their own right, owing to both their success and the ideas they pioneered. However, the cars’ often frail nature led to driver deaths and injury, making Chapman at times a contentious figure.
The Lotus founder’s approach was embodied in several of his quotations which have been immortalised: “Simplify, then add lightness,”; “Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere,”; “Any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.”
His monocoque Lotus 25; the Lotus 49 with its stressed-member Cosworth DFV engine; the wedge-shaped Lotus 72 and the Lotus 79 – thought by many to be the ultimate ground effect F1 machine – all prompted engineering revolutions in grand prix racing.
On the grid with Elio De Angelis and Nigel Mansell in the early 1980s
The Colin Chapman Foundation
These brilliant designs were accompanied by road car productions which were developed as a business to support the racing activities, but also became instantly recognisable too.
The Lotus 7 (still produced by Caterham), the Elan and Esprit all made themselves production car favourites, as well as examples from the post-Chapman era such as the Elise.
Chapman was nicknamed ‘The White Tornado’ by his colleagues, his irrepressible energy informing the company’s approach, but the racing world was stunned when the tireless team boss died of a heart-attack aged just 54.
His small, idiosyncratic company based in a quiet corner of Norfolk had already made its mark on the racing and automotive world though, one that is still felt today.
Here’s the story of the charismatic, inimitable, controversial Colin Chapman.
Colin Chapman: The early years
Colin Chapman (left) with Peter Allen in the Lotus workshop 1950
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Colin Chapman was born on May 19, 1928 in London and grew up near the Muswell Hill area in the north of the city.
His father Stanley ran the Railway Hotel pub in Hornsey, (where the family also lived) which was to become a significant early location for Lotus.
As a teenager Chapman was an enthusiastic attendee of dances at Hornsey Town Hall (he got in free since Stanley ran the catering) and at one such event in March 1944 he met Hazel Williams. His future wife of 38 years was a key pillar against Chapman’s tumultuous life to come of triumph and tragedy.
“I wasn’t an enthusiast – I never went to a race meeting until I actually raced myself” Colin Chapman
“I remember thinking after our first meeting, ‘Here is someone a bit different. This chap will go places,'” she told Jabby Crombac in his authorised Chapman biography.
Hazel relates how even at an early age, the precocious young Chapman was already set on engineering invention.
“In late 1944 when the Germans were bombing London with their doodlebugs [the V1 rockets], Colin and his father designed a device which spotted whether a particular ‘doodlebug’ was going to land anywhere near the hotel.
“They would then know whether everybody should take shelter or not!”
Chapman would enrol for an engineering degree at University College, but at that time showed little interest in formal study – instead developing a burgeoning second-hand car business with his friend Colin Dare.
Colin Chapman’s first Lotus Cars – From MkI to 7
Hazel Chapman in the Lotus MkI
Lotus
Despite Chapman not being completely bowled over by a life of lectures and seminars, he was still learning what would become crucial engineering information.
Buying second-hand cars had made him aware of how antiquated most British automotive technology was, so he soon set about modifying vehicles which came into his possession.
The most famous early example was the boxy Austin Seven saloon, a car so unedifying that Chapman couldn’t sell it, so he began to experiment with it instead. His new creation – the Lotus MkI – was completed in 1947.
“I was not really an enthusiast [who wanted to go racing, at first],” he said. “In fact I never went to a race meeting until I actually raced myself.
“I was enthusiastic for building a thing which moved, so while at university I decided to build my own ‘special’.
Colin and Hazel take on a trial contest
“This [the Mk1] was going to be a touring car. I had been working on it for almost a year when I came across a car trial which was taking place at Aldershot. I was quite fascinated by this and rushed back to the partly finished ‘special’ and turned it into a trials car.”
Thus Chapman’s taste for competition was born. The ‘trials’ events entailed running the car over rough terrain, for which the Seven had its suspension and engine modified by Chapman, in addition to the alloy-bonded plywood. This created fully stressed bodywork which compensated for the original car’s lack of rigidity.
Dubbed the Lotus, no solid evidence has ever emerged for the reason behind the moniker: while it’s thought that most likely it was a pet name for wife Hazel, the Chapman episode of the documentary series Millionaire says the engineer told the film-makers he saw the word on a bathroom fitting.
In one go Chapman’s fervour for design creativity and competition had been encapsulated in the MkI, the stage set for a life in motor sport.
The Lotus MkII – featuring more nascent Chapman design ideas
Lotus
Chapman graduated from university in 1948 and immediately joined the RAF, but still found time to exercise his four-wheel passion too, developing a whole series of cars featuring further innovations.
The Lotus MkII featured a ‘jelly-joint’ which Chapman adapted from the design of a tractor’s front suspension system.
In June 1950 he drove it to a win at Silverstone, in what Motor Sport reported as “a really furious duel with Dudley Gahagan’s Mk37 Bugatti.” From this point onwards he focused on race car design as opposed to trials.
The Lotus MkIII emerged following Chapman’s burgeoning interest in 750 sports car racing, and was financed by selling Mks I and II via the pages of Motor Sport.
Again based on an Austin 7, the car had a sleek, lightweight body to reduce drag, as well as 14-gauge tubular cross-members for torsional stiffness.
It was instantly faster than competitors in the 750 Motor Club, and racer Adam Currie commissioned Chapman to make one for himself – it would be the first Lotus to be sold to a customer.
Chapman would then produce another customer car, the trials-based MkIV before his first ever production machine – the MkVI.
Chapman in the Lotus VIII in 1954
The extremely light-framed racer was one of the first kit cars available for purchasers to buy and build, proving successful on track and commercially – and was manufactured until 1957.
All the while, Chapman had been looking at developing closed-body sports cars, the first of which was the Lotus VIII.
A number of associates were made during this period who would help Chapman build his cars, including Mike Costin who would achieve immense racing success with the Cosworth DFV racing engine, designed with Keith Duckworth.
It was Mike’s brother Frank who designed the VIII’s bodywork and, not for the last time, aircraft design knowledge was used in the engineering of a Lotus, with Peter Ross and Gilbert McIntosh lending Chapman their expertise.
Chapman used the car to beat former Mercedes grand prix star Hans Herrmann in a works Porsche at a 1954 British Grand Prix support race – the first time Lotus was noticed on the international scene.
The VIII was quickly followed by the IX, X and eleven. In 1957 Chapman and his friends came up with a design which is still being manufactured by Caterham today: the Lotus 7.
Karl Ludwigsen picks up the story in his Colin Chapman: Inside the Innovator.
“For better or worse the Mark VI established Lotus as a maker of uncompromising sports cars for the rabid enthusiast. That Lotus had abandoned this market was bemoaned in 1957 by Colin’s wife Hazel at a Sunday lunch at their home.
Lotus 7 in action at Silverstone in 1960
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“Lotus no longer made ‘a cheap kit car like the VI for ‘the boys’’, she complained to Chapman and colleague Gilbert ‘Mac’ McIntosh. The men were nominated to do the washing-up after Hazel’s lunchtime cooking, but they spotted a way out.
“By tea time we had done a weight check,” said McIntosh, “Cost estimate, quick performance check, done a few sketches of bodywork and the idea looked good. We had finished by midnight. Colin ordered the springs on Monday, moved an Eleven chassis to the panel beaters and the Seven was running by the following weekend.”
Lotus Engineering Co was now based out of the stables behind Stanley’s pub as Chapman’s business began to grow – he sold over 2,500 7s as the club racing scene flourished. Produced from 1957 and ceasing production in 1972, he sold the rights to Caterham, which has manufactured a version of the 7 since 1974. It remains one of the most popular club racing models today.
Lotus goes racing for real – F1, Indianapolis and Le Mans
Meanwhile, Lotus’s own racing prototypes had become more serious.
Produced in 1953, the Mk VIII sports car featured the firm’s first ever all-enveloping body, with the aerodynamics overseen by Mike Costin’s brother Frank.
Evolution models followed, eventually leading to the Lotus Eleven, an enduring classic. 270 were made in all its iterations, and many can still be seen at historic race meetings today – Bill Boddy said in Motor Sport’s review at the time that it was a car “which will provide exhilarating motoring and is capable of opening the door to success in club racing”.
Herbert Mackay-Fraser in a Lotus Eleven at Le Mans in 1957
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As a works concern, the car claimed seventh overall (as well as further class wins) at the 1956 Le Mans 24 Hours with Reg Bicknell and Peter Jopp at the wheel. Stirling Moss took a a 1100cc class record with a 143 mph (230 km/h) lap at Monza and the car also secured class wins at Sebring.
However, Chapman had his eye on grand prix racing. During 1956, in a casual deal, he was asked by Vanwall to given advice on its spaceframe chassis — which he did in a rough sketch and quickly explained to staff how it worked — and put forward Frank Costin to design the bodywork.
Chapman was even nominated to drive one of Vanwall’s cars on the recommendation of Stirling Moss at the 1956 French GP, but the former managed to crash into the back of team-mate Mike Hawthorn in practice, writing off any chance of racing.
However, his expert advice helped set Vanwall on its way to becoming F1’s first ever constructors’ champion in 1958.
Damon Hill at the 1958 Monaco GP in the Lotus 12
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Chapman’s own first grand prix car, the Lotus 12, was typical in that again it featured a number of innovations including a five-speed, sequential ‘queerbox’, ‘Chapman strut’ spring/damper arrangement and weight-saving ‘wobbly web’ wheels – all contained in a tightly packaged body – as was becoming a signature.
Motor Sport was lucky enough to take out the 12 ourselves on Christmas Day in 1957 in one of the more unusual F1 track (or road) tests, and the car impressed at the circuit too.
Cliff Allison almost scored points on a momentous Lotus world championship debut at the 1958 Monaco GP by finishing sixth, before taking the same place again at Zandvoort and then scoring its first championship points by snatching fourth at Spa.
Lotus mechanic turned driver Graham Hill would either retire or finish out of the points in both the 12 and its 16 update throughout ’58 and ’59, but things would rapidly improve in the form of another innovative Chapman car.
In its second world championship race, Moss claimed an emphatic Principality win by almost a minute over Bruce McLaren’s Cooper. The 18 was the first Lotus to be mid-engined (as opposed to front), as well as having a separate front anti-roll bar in a car of arresting dimensions – it was only 71cm high and weighed just 440kg.
“It is a much more elegant structural proposition, you are able to react the loads between the transmission and the engine directly in one package,” explained Chapman of moving to a rearward design.
“You have reduced heat problems for the driver in the cockpit; you can put the fuel much nearer the centre of gravity.
Stirling Moss in the Lotus 18/21 at the 1961 Monaco GP
“The old front-engined cars really did everything wrong: you had the weight of the engine in the front, the driver in the middle, the fuel in the back. As the fuel load changed, it produced tremendous variations in the weight distribution…”
Moss would take further wins with both the 18 and its 18/21 successor, while Innes Ireland took a first works victory at Watkins Glen to close out the 1961 season. However the former was seriously injured mid-1960 with two broken legs when a defective wheel hub gave way at Spa. Reliability issues and subsequent harrowing crashes would come to be a theme of Team Lotus.
Ireland himself expressed his dissatisfaction to Chapman’s approach to safety in design after experiencing one close encounter too many.
“Colin’s idea of a grand prix car was it should win the race and, as it crossed the finishing line, it should collapse in a heap of bits,” he said. “If it didn’t do that, it was built too strongly.”
Joining Ireland for a first full campaign that year was Jim Clark, the driver who become the archetypal Chapman driver, embodying both the triumph and tragedy of its F1 story.
Jim Clark and Lotus’s first glory years
Chapman and Clark at Lotus in 1963
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Colin Chapman first met Jim Clark at the 1958 Brands Hatch Boxing Day meeting when he found himself in the same race as the young Scotsman, only just managing to beat him by making a daring last-lap pass.
Clark and Lotus again crossed paths when the Scot was testing for the Aston Martin GP team at Goodwood. Clark tried out the Lotus 18 the team had brought along, and a suitably impressed Chapman soon signed him up.
The future double world champion became indelibly linked with the ground-breaking cars which would secure Lotus its first world titles and place in racing legend.
The Lotus 25 arrived in 1962 as the first fully-stressed monocoque machine in F1, and Clark took it to three victories in 1962 before utterly dominating 1963 by claiming seven wins out of ten races, giving the team both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships for the first time.
Clark at one with the Lotus 33
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Low-slung and narrow even compared to the other grand prix cars of the day, the monocoque made for a more rigid chassis, three times stronger than its predecessor 24. The design had secured Chapman’s burning ambition: to win a world championship.
Though introduced in 1962, the car was still competitive two years later for Clark to take three further ’64 victories before switching to the initially troublesome 33 – the Scot only missing out on that year’s title due to a last-lap oil leak in Mexico.
With the 33 sorted for ’65, Clark dominated again, his six wins bringing another world title.
Clark and co hadn’t even bothered to show up in Monaco that year, instead preferring the Indianapolis 500, where Lotus had been upsetting the local IndyCar drivers with its ‘back-to-front’ designs for a couple of years already.
“I was shocked to see the way car design over there had stagnated,” said Chapman of US racing. “They just hadn’t had the spur of competition that we’d had in Europe to develop new and better cars. I felt that all we needed to do was take a European style car to the States and we’d be successful.”
Clark at the Indianapolis 500 in 1965
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Chapman was right in his summation: though threatening to win at previous editions of the race, 1965 is the year he and Clark truly cracked the 500 with the Lotus 38.
The 500bhp beast was significantly larger than its contemporary F1 cars, but still a neat and small proposition compared to Indy rivals.
Clark both took pole and dominated the ‘65 race, finishing 2min ahead of Parnelli Jones and Mario Andretti – Chapman had now conquered racing on both sides of the pond.
Lotus was often defined by ecstatic peaks and crushing lows, and ’66 proved difficult with the move to 3-litre F1 specification. The new 43 had taken on the unreliable and heavy H16 BRM engine in lieu of the forthcoming Ford-Cosworth DFV engine, with Clark scoring one win at Watkins Glen.
Come 1967 though, Lotus and Chapman again rocked F1 to its core. With Clark at the wheel, the brand-new Lotus 49 won on debut at the Dutch Grand Prix.
The car’s innovative DFV engine was a structural part of the car as stressed member. The potent combination of power unit and car put the team second in the constructors’ fight despite being without it for the first two rounds of the season.
All was looking good for ’68, until disaster struck. After winning the first F1 round of the season in South Africa, Jim Clark found himself competing in a Hockenheim F2 race in treacherous conditions.
The car left the track in the opening stages and plunged into the dense forest next to the track, killing the Scot instantly.
Chapman was deeply affected by the loss, and Clark’s team-mate Hill, who years earlier had been working spanner in hand for Lotus, was left to pick up the team at its lowest ebb. That he did, securing his second F1 crown and another for constructors’ for Lotus by the end of 1968.
Life after Clark: Lotus in the 1970s and 1980s
F1 aerodynamcis took off in the late ’60s – with Chapman at the centre of the action. Here Lotus’s Jochen Rindt leads the pack
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Jochen Rindt was brought in as Clark’s replacement, and with the Austrian at the helm Lotus took off once more – with innovation at the heart of its progress again.
Chapman had observed Chaparral’s first experiments with aerodynamics on its 2F sports car, and added winglets himself to Hill’s 49 at the 1968 Monaco GP. The modifications clearly helped Hill to a fourth Principality win, and a few races later the changes had developed into a full scale rear wing placed high above the car on struts.
Rindt would come in for ’69. Though he and Lotus were a winning combination, the Austrian had serious arguments with Chapman over the safety of his cars, which came to a head when the rear wing failed at Montjuïc Park in 1969, sending Rindt into barriers and leaving him bloodied and bruised. This occurred, according to Lotus test driver John Miles, due the wings being quickly and crudely extended at each end in between practice sessions.
Rindt feels the full force of a rear-wing failure at the 1969 Spanish GP
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Despite his misgivings, Rindt stayed on with Lotus for 1970 and was initially rewarded with Chapman’s next stroke of genius, the Lotus 72.
The 72 would not only prove to be an innovative car on its introduction – integrated wings, inboard brakes and side-mounted radiators marked the wedge-shaped car out from the crowd – it would also endure as one of F1’s longest successful campaigners. Its final win came in 1974, four years after its introduction.
Rindt elected to carry on with Lotus, taking four wins in a row to dominate 1970 – but then catastrophe hit again.
After the team removed the car’s wings to help with slipstreaming at Monza for the Italian GP, Rindt lost control on the back straight and was killed as the front of the car came away.
Chapman expanded his thoughts on driver safety in his own notebook in 1975 – significantly after he had seen several drivers either seriously injured or killed at the wheel of a Lotus: “A racing car has only one objective: to win motor races,” he wrote.
“If it does not, it is nothing but a waste of time and money. It does not matter how … safe it is, if it does not consistently win it is nothing.”
The Lotus boss would also compare the pursuit of driving an F1 car to climbing a mountain – intimating that death was simply an occupational hazard.
Two years later, Fittipaldi was the hero as the team claimed another title double in 1972.
However, the Brazilian left the next year in a fit of pique after he and team-mate Ronnie Peterson took too many points off each other in 1973. Things came to a head at Monza when team orders were supposed to kick in if the Swede had to help Fittipaldi in the title fight. This should have happened when the pair were running one-two respectively in the race, but the order never came, with Chapman apparently indifferent.
“After, I went to Colin, very disappointed, and he said, ‘Well, I decided not to give the signal,’” said Fittipaldi, with Chapman known to be a fan of Peterson and his charismatic driving approach.
The title went to Jackie Stewart and Tyrrell, it marking the downturn of the Lotus team’s fortunes for a while.
The 72’s successor, the 76, was dysfunctional and scored points only once as the team floundered.
It took Lotus pairing up with Mario Andretti to galvanise Chapman again. The interim 77 car helped the American win the final race of the 1976 season, but its 78 follow-up was a watershed moment.
Emerson Fittipaldi at the 1972 French GP in his Lotus 72 – an era defining F1 car
Grand Prix Photo
Overseen by Chapman and designed by Tony Rudd, Ralph Bellamy, Martin Ogilvie and Peter Wright, the 78 car introduced the idea of ground-effect to F1, channelling the air underneath it to in effect suck the car to the ground – aided by skirts running along the side of the car.
Described by Andretti as being “painted to the road”, the 78 would give the team five wins in 1977. The team took another six the next year when the American secured the F1 title he craved using its evolution, the 79 – viewed by many as the ultimate ground-effect machine.
However, once more the team was touched by tragedy. Andretti’s much-loved team-mate Peterson was killed in a first lap crash at the 1978 Italian GP, the very race Andretti became champion.
In what was now the traditional ebb and flow of Lotus, its new-for-1979 prototype – the 80 – was supposed to be logical endpoint of ground effect, the entire car acting as a wing.
However, the car suffered from ‘porpoising’, pitching up and down at high speed, and proved uncompetitive.
Andretti left the team as another fallow period ensued.
Drivers Carlos Reutemann, Nigel Mansell and Elio de Angelis would show intermittent promise as the team cycled through the 81, 87 and 91 cars – as well as one more Chapman innovation, the double-chassis Lotus 88, which was immediately excluded when other teams protested its design legality.
De Angelis scored one more Lotus win at the 1982 Austrian GP before the world of Lotus changed forever.
Death of Colin Chapman – Lotus loses its talisman
Chapman would die suddenly at the age of 54
Grand Prix Photo
In the early hours of December 16, 1982 Colin Chapman died of a heart-attack at the age of just 54.
That day his team were at Snetterton testing yet another technological breakthrough for F1: active suspension. The race team were informed of his death trackside.
The Hethel team was bereft of its talisman – a leader, innovator and heavyweight political operator.
The team would rally to some extent under the guidance of team manager Peter Warr and eventual new technical director Gerard Ducarouge, without hitting the same heights it previously enjoyed.
Once a young Ayrton Senna was installed in the car for three seasons from 1985, the team was an outside title contender, but would never again secure another championship. It folded in 1994.
Lotus lives on through its road cars
Margaret Thatcher tries out a Lotus Esprit
Meanwhile Chapman’s legacy lives on in Lotus road cars today, but it too has had its ups and downs.
The Lotus Elite (1958) became an immediate hit for the discerning driver – including Motor Sport – when it was introduced, despite the tendency for some of Chapman’s road cars to develop reliability issues.
The tiny Elan (1962) came to embody everything about Chapman’s lightweight design philosophy, if you weren’t too tall to fit in it.
The Esprit (1976) was immortalised by its use in two James Bond films – The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, as well as being tried for size in a famous visit by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981.
Lotus Elise has become a modern-day classic
In later years the Elise (1996) has become a modern-day classic, while the Lotus Evija hypercar and Eletre are its new electric vehicles as the company looks to become all-electric by 2028.
At the time of Chapman’s death he was heavily involved with John DeLorean, who he had joined forces with to help develop the DMC DeLorean road car with funding from the British government.
As the project foundered, DeLorean was charged with trafficking cocaine by the US government in 1982, leading to DMC’s collapse.
Through this it emerged that £10m of the UK taxpayer’s money put into the company had gone missing, and was eventually discovered in Swiss bank accounts that had been controlled by Chapman, DeLorean and Lotus accountant Fred Bushell, who was sentenced to three years in jail.
