Good luck to them and all the staff working long hours to get these new projects going.

That was an amazing period for F1 car design, in which the outlandish gifts of such as Chapman were given free rein and therefore in which those gifts were always going to shine, certainly in terms of their products capturing one’s attention, and also, when they got it right, in terms of results on the circuit. Even when they got it wrong, their new creations would still stir us. I vividly remember being stunned at the first glimpse of Black Beauty’s successor, the 80. A complete lemon as it transpired, we all know, and no looker compared to its predecessor (what could be?), but wow, when we first saw its radical features (that low rear wing!), our breath was taken away.

Every F1 winter used to be like that. We would keenly anticipate Motoring News on Wednesday and Autosport on Thursday to see the first shots of a new car, usually “launched” against the glamorous backdrop of a brick wall in Reading or somewhere, but you didn’t need fake glitz when the cars themselves had real charisma. And Colin Chapman’s latest Lotus was always the one we anticipated most keenly of all. His launch backdrops were swankier too. No brick walls for Lotus – they had the front porch at Ketteringham Hall!

All this comes to mind when I try and compare it with the extent to which this week’s images from Valencia have stirred me. Yes, it’s been a bit of a novelty to see the first shots of Alonso’s sky blue helmet peering out of Ferrari red, or Button’s lid (red, white and blue again, I notice) in the new McLaren, or Schumacher returning as Brawn white morphs into Mercedes silver, or the new Renault livery (it’s a ’98 Jordan, isn’t it?) etc etc.

But it’s nothing like marvelling at the wonderful variety of designs which greeted us in that winter of ’78/79, or seeing the first shots of Mansell and Piquet in the FW11 at Rio testing in ’86 and thinking it was not only proving quicker than the FW10, but was a lot prettier too.

The thing was, the rules allowed full scope to a Chapman or a Murray back then. If they allowed for something as weirdly radical as a Brabham BT48, they also allowed a team to get back in the hunt quickly if “weirdly radical” proved to be “spectacularly
awful” as well, as Murray showed when the BT48 was replaced by the successful (but still distinctive) BT49.

If the rules had been as restictive back then as they have been over the last decade or more, Lotus might have carried on as champions after 1978 (on the admittedly big assumption that the rules would have allowed Type 79 in the first place) because Chapman wouldn’t have been allowed to go down the blind alley of the Type 80 and everybody else would just have been able to make incremental moves towards the 79′s performance levels rather than leapfrog straight past it.

That’s one of the reasons why Ferrari was able to go on and on having monotonous success for so long in more recent seasons and why, last season apart (when, by an amazing coincidence, the design rules had been shaken up), no team for years has been able to come from nowhere and break into the established top two or three.

(Another point here – there’s nothing new about the likes of Ferrari having a massive budget, but thirty years ago less well-financed teams were able to get ahead through innovation. Freeing up the technical side doesn’t hinder smaller teams, it helps them)

But would Chapman have preferred endless victories, just tinkering at the edges of the same package, to the roller-coaster of success followed by glorious failure which his pursuit of the radical always ensured? I doubt it. I suspect he would have quickly become bored.

So no, the new Lotus team can never be the real deal, but nor could any team in these days of Mosleyite same-old same-old, even if it was called Team Lotus, based at Hethel and had a principal called Colin Chapman. So bearing that in mind, I wish the new Lotus boys the very best of British, or perhaps in due course Malaysian, luck.

I wish the new team every success, but their use of the Lotus name is ludicrous.

kjd

I am sad to say that ‘splendid gentleman’ Fred Milln has left, but he has been replaced by a splendid lady by the name of Cara Borton!

If you do have any issues with copies arriving then do give her a call.

All the best

EF

In the last few months the magazine has been on the news stands 3 or 4 days before it arrives in the post here in rural Norfolk (just down the road from the Lotus factory).

That said, I’ve seen the Feb. issue in Bookstores for a while now, but mine isn’t here yet..

Your beef should be with the US Postal Service. In Australia I get my subscription copy within a week of it hitting the stands in the UK. In fact Motor Sport is much more efficient than a weekly English glossy magazine I used to subscribe to in getting its issues out.

Looking forward to the Lotus issue my childhood memories are of the real Team Lotus racing in the Tasman series here in the sixties. My favourite car being the 33 that Clark campaigned here in 1967.

Having been a fan since about 1968, at the tender age of 9 years old, Lotus was always my reason for getting into F1. Therefore 1982 was such a terrible year, and the years to follow, well it kind of never got back to the glory days. So of course the new Team Lotus has so much to live up to, and so much to loose.

Still I welcome the new Team Lotus into F1, I hope and pray that Gascoyne and Fernandez will make it, and that Lotus will again get back into the winners circle, and I will be the first to cheer them on.

Who knows, maybe Colin will have something to smile about, and chuck his cap in the air about again, wherever he is! He came across as someone who thrived with any challenge, and I am sure that whichever heaven he resides in, he is smiling at the challenge facing the new Team Lotus!