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by David Finlay (05 Jun 06) Nearly every type of Lotus that has ever raced has been included, though Pritchard has deliberately omitted the Seven, even though the nearly 50 years of that model's production (under the name of Caterham since Lotus sold the rights in 1973) it must have racked up more racing miles than all the others put together. "I have to draw the line somewhere," says Pritchard in his introduction, and the reason for drawing it where he did is that the Seven has almost entirely been used for competition on an amateur basis. So were the very earliest cars, of course, such as the Austin-based Mark I trials car of 1949, but by the time the Seven appeared Lotus was already on the way to higher things. Reasonably enough, Pritchard devotes a lot of pages to the true classics such as the 25, 49 and 79 Grand Prix cars. Their stories are not as clear-cut as you might at first imagine. The 25 appeared to break new ground thanks to its monocoque construction, but that wasn't founding genius Colin Chapman's idea. The best thing about the 49, which exploded into Formula 1 in 1967, was its Ford-financed, Cosworth-designed DFV engine. Chapman's best move there was to get exclusive use of what immediately proved to be the most powerful engine available to any GP team, and his worst was to secure that deal for one year only (the best-ever Lotus driver, Jim Clark, was irritated that other teams would get their hands on it as Lotus was getting the rest of the car sorted). As for the 79, the company's second attempt at making ground-effect aerodynamics work in F1, it blitzed the sport in 1968, but Lotus couldn't follow it up. The 80 which followed it was designed to produce even more ground effect, when what Lotus really needed was a chassis stiff enough to cope with the ground effect it already had. First Ligier and then Williams got it the right way round, and very quickly made Lotus look like also-rans. Chapman's response was to design the massively complicated twin-chassis 88, which was legislated out of existence as quickly as the rule-makers could write new clauses in the regulations. From the point of view of aesthetics this was perhaps just as well, since the 88 was also one of the pig-ugliest racing cars ever devised. |
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Few racing cars have been as magnificent as a really good Lotus, and not many have been embarrassing as a really bad one. The company's motorsport history therefore contains an exceptional number of both highs and lows. Anthony Pritchard's latest book, Lotus: The Competition Cars, takes the reader through a very wide range of emotions, including celebration, wonder, pity and much else.
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