The disastrous Lola F1 team: 'We got slagged off, but we were proud'

The deal was done in late 1996, initially with a view to racing in 1998. However, encouraged by the sponsor, Broadley didn’t want to wait. Against the advice of others he insisted on joining Stewart GP as a new entrant in the following year’s World Championship.

Lola obviously had proven manufacturing capability, but the company lacked the infrastructure to actually operate the cars, which were to be powered by outdated Ford Zetec V8s. The man tasked with pulling everything together was team manager Ray Boulter.

“I had run the Middlebridge F3000 team, and we had Lolas for a couple of years,” he recalls. ”So I think I had a good connection with them. Then Middlebridge brought Brabham, and I ran that until it died.

“I was working for Nick Mason, looking after his collection of cars, and I got a phone call from somebody at Lola saying would I be interested in running an F1 team? So I went up there, had an interview, and unfortunately, I got the job!

“I think I knew even at the interview with Eric that there were issues. He asked me some questions and I said, ‘Well, you’re obviously short of money.’ He got all uppity and said, ‘What makes you say that?’ I said, ‘If you had unlimited funds, you’d have Jean Todt sitting here. But you haven’t, you’ve got me!’”

Boulter sensed that even within Lola there were doubts about the project: “I said to him the biggest part of the job was going to be integrating an F1 team into the factory. And it was exactly right. There were people that were really up for it in the factory, and people that were really anti. And it was trying to tread that line between the two.

“Everybody was saying to Eric: ‘Why do we have to do it?’ Stewart had spent 18 months on it, they’d spent a year going to races investigating what equipment they needed and all that sort of stuff.”

Boulter faced a huge challenge given that the first race in Australia was on March 9, so he had just four months to build an F1 team from scratch.

“I was the first guy that started on the team, on November 1 1996,” he says. “They had nothing, although they built cars, they had nothing to run a car, they had no jacks, they didn’t have anything at all. We didn’t take anybody from the factory, and I employed everybody, apart from the design staff.

“DTM [ITC] was just finishing, and at that time they had active suspension and were very technical cars. So I took a lot of guys from DTM that were either unemployed, or becoming unemployed. I don’t think I took anybody from another F1 team.”

Boulter chose not to worry too much about the finances: “I was snowed under with what I was doing. I was more concerned about getting to Australia. That was 100% of my time, just getting there. We had Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, and then we were working seven days a week.”

In parallel with putting the race team together Lola also had to design and build the T97/30, which was to be raced by Vincenzo Sospiri and Ricardo Rosset, team mates at the Super Nova F3000 outfit two years earlier.

“It was going to be based on the 1995 test car,” says Boulter. “But it was it was a completely new car, everything on it. Every single nut and bolt was different to anything they had produced before.

“I asked Eric why it had two lines of bolt holes down the gearbox, and he said so we can change roll centres and try different anti-squat and anti-dive. And I thought surely you should know where the suspension is going to go, and not do it by trial and error?

“Eric also said if we’re not the fastest Bridgestone runner by the middle of the year, I’ll shoot myself. I said let’s just keep our heads down. And hopefully the bullets will go over the top! Looking back, it was character-building, to say the least…”

Against the odds everything came together in time for a glitzy launch event at the London Hilton, where the Mastercard logos were joined on the car by those of Pennzoil. In retrospect the team was somewhat ahead of its time in attracting two giant US brands.

A Silverstone shakedown saw just eight laps completed amid gearbox software and downshift problems before the team headed to Melbourne, where Broadley acted as team principal, technical director and race engineer to Sospiri.

“We were absolutely ready,” says Boulter. “We even had a trailer to take the equipment to the airport. So we were really set for the season. Obviously, things would need to be updated and changed as we went along. But the basis was there.

“The first time we saw the refuelling rig was in Australia. There was an element of relief that we didn’t qualify, because I was petrified. Our first refuelling would have been in the race, if we had made it…”

It was a shambles really – but we were trying out best

In fact the team came nowhere near to fulfilling the 107% rule. In qualifying rookie Sospiri was five seconds adrift of the next slowest car, the Arrows of Pedro Diniz, while Rosset was a further second back. Downshifting and a lack of tyre temperature were among the issues with which the drivers struggled.

“We were a completely new team, guys that have never been in an F1 pitlane before,” says Boulter. “And it was a shambles really, not to put too fine a point on it. But we were trying to do our best.

“A lot of people slagged off the team, but the guys were working just as hard if not harder than the guys at the front running teams. They had got hundreds of people, whereas we had a small bunch, trying to do the same job, and really grafting.

“We had some very good guys, and we had some weak links as well. There would have been changes and updates. We came back and had a massive debrief. We had to juggle people around and get them in the right positions.”

After a troubled test at Silverstone the team headed to round two at Interlagos, where the plan was to use the quiet days before the action started to get the team into shape.

“When we got to Brazil I said to the guys it’s taking us far too long to get the car out onto the track,” says Boulter. “From when the engineers were saying ‘let’s go’ it was taking a minute to get the cars out. So we practised getting the car off the stands, and out on the circuit.

“I went off to do some paperwork or something, and then I went back to the garage. They simulated a wing change, and it was let’s go, wheels on, and it was slick, certainly much more so than Australia. I thought that’s a massive improvement, well done. Then about five minutes later the phone rang in the office, and it was ‘come home’.”

“At first I thought Eric had died, being brutally honest. I was told don’t say anything to anybody, just get packed up and come home. And that’s as much as we knew. It was a bit of a shock.”

In fact Broadley, who hadn’t travelled to Brazil, had accepted the inevitable. The $1.8m Pennzoil deal didn’t make up for the fact that the Mastercard funding was going to be too little, and too late. The ambitious scheme required time to get the partner banks and their customers on board in order generate the sort of income figures that were being talked about.

“I even contemplated running in Brazil, because we were there, everything was paid for, hotels were paid,” says Boulter. “Rosset, who was Brazilian, obviously wanted to run. I think there would have been a marked improvement. Whether we’d have qualified or not, I don’t know. But we certainly would have performed better than we did in Australia.”

Missing an event meant that the team was dead in the water as far as the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone were concerned, and despite some talk in the following weeks about selling the project, there was to be no second chance.

“When we got back to the factory, Eric was very embarrassed,” says Boulter. “I think I saw him briefly, and that was it. Everything was just sort of shut down, boxed up. I don’t think I even saw the cars again, or the equipment.