How Lotus was forced out of F1

When Peter Wright was pitched in to keep Team Lotus alive at the beginning of the 1990s, he was both out of his comfort zone and out of his depth. He recalled the unequal fight he and Peter Collins faced before the team closed in 1994.

“I was managing director of Lotus Engineering for two years, which was not really up my street as a manager of 500 engineers and technicians – although I learned a lot. Tony Rudd was helping the Chapman family run Team Lotus, and they were basically running out of money. That’s when Tony said to me, ‘Team Lotus is going to close unless somebody does something about it. What about you?’ All I could affect was the engineering side, but I said I’d talk to my mate Peter Collins, who had some unfinished F1 business after leaving Benetton [mid-1989]. God knows how we did it, but we scrambled together some sort of a deal to take over.

“That was the end of 1990. But the Gulf War saw off any sponsors. So we went into the 1991 season with the previous year’s car, and we kept the team going for four years, although I know not how. We were on a wing and a prayer. In the last year but one we had Cosworth engines and owed them quite a lot of money, then got a Mugen engine for the next year. Honda were, we understood, very interested in Team Lotus, partly because we were back doing active suspension again and they couldn’t believe a two-bit outfit was managing it. They were looking for a team to put money into. Cosworth reckoned if they threatened us with administration Honda would come up and bail us out. They were wrong, so we went down.

“The big problem with Team Lotus was following Chapman’s death they didn’t invest in technology, whereas McLaren and Williams did. They built big wind tunnels, formed relationships with engine manufacturers. Team Lotus did not do that. It’s unfair to think the family could have raised the money. But that’s why it failed.”