65 years of Lotus F1 cars — the greatest track tests

In 2001, we reunited Allison with the 12. The man from Westmorland was one of Britain’s most promising F1 aces before his career was cut cruelly short by a crash in practice for the 1961 Belgian GP.

The 12 featured such innovations as the ‘wobbly web’ wheels and unconventional ‘queerbox’ transmission, but luckily Allison hadn’t lost his touch.

“It is a bit of a knack,” he told Motor Sport of the idiosyncratic shifter. “In those days I could handle it quite well. It was a positive-stop arrangement like a motorcycle — push down the lever to go up the cogs, flick it up to go down. You just do it with your hand rather than foot.

“It was a brilliant idea — if it could have been more reliable.”

Allison needn’t have worried – in our track test of the first Lotus GP car, it was like the ‘50s F1 hero had never been away.

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Lotus 18

Another landmark machine, the 18 delivered the first Lotus GP win in the hands of Stirling Moss at Monaco ‘60. it was one that cemented Chapman’s principles of speed through lightness.

The first rear-engined Lotus F1 car, the spaceframe chassis had lightweight body panels attached to it and, in the hands of ‘The Boy’, proved a devastating racing weapon.

The car is incredibly small in proportion too, with just 49 inches between the front wheels – appropriate, then, that Chapman considered this his first ‘proper’ F1 design.

In our June 2000 track test, Cosworth engine design axis Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin were on hand as they helped Chapman fettle the car on its victorious Formula Junior Goodwood debut in 1960 with Jim Clark at the wheel.

Powered by a tuned 95bhp Ford Anglia engine as per the rules for the Sussex race, the car was a masterpiece in economy, and in its F1 guise soon proved the fastest grand prix prototype ever made up to that point.

Innes Ireland won the non-championship Glover Trophy at Goodwood shortly after, before Moss (with an increased capacity Climax engine) hauled in the first world championship win at Monaco in quick succession.

“There were terrible problems with the camshaft and we were going to go broke if my next design didn’t work,” Duckworth said to Motor Sport of the engine issues that first weekend at Goodwood.

“So I started from square one and this time, it worked for the Anglia engine. But it was a real trauma on the weekend that Jim won; the engine had oil surge in practice and we had to change the big ends and the mains. We did it in the paddock with the car on its side, Mike and I, him being Lotus, me being Cosworth.

“But we could see for ourselves that we were off to a good start. Jim, John Surtees [driving a Cooper] and Trevor Taylor in the other Lotus were substantially ahead of everyone else. They were out on their own.” The rest is history.

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Lotus 25

The first truly successful monocoque racing car, Lotus’s first to take the drivers’ World Championship, the first to to claim the constructors’ crown too.

There’s no other way to look at it: the 25 is a legendary racing offering, not just for Norfolk’s finest but F1 as a whole – this car led the way in chassis design from hereon in.

The first true example of the Clark-Chapman driver-designer relationship operating at full tilt, the car took three championship race wins in the hands of the Scot in ’62, and seven out of the ’63 season’s ten races to win the drivers’ crown at a canter.

Who else more appropriate to test the car for Motor Sport then, than a man who, like Clark, is a multiple British-GP-at-Silverstone winner: David Coulthard.

“Well, if you’d just like to put me in the back of the truck I’ll stay in here. Tell the wife and kids I love them, but I might not be home,” he said of an instant love affair with the 25.

The brilliant relative simplicity of Chapman’s design still stands out today.

“He just did a GA [general arrangement] drawing — he was a marvellous draughtsman — and we expanded from that and some vague sketches,” said Cedric Selzer, Clark’s longtime mechanic.

“It was trial and error. No one knew if it would work. The big problem was fitting in enough fuel: Dick Scammell and Ted Woodley had riveting experience — at that time we couldn’t weld that hard ally — and made the tanks bigger and bigger and the cockpit smaller and smaller, with Jim trying it each time. We really didn’t know if it was a leap forward until I did the torsion tests, when it was obvious it was far more rigid than the 24.”

“I actually whooped on Hangar Straight! I’ve never done that before in a car,” adds DC. “It’s just how I felt.”

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Lotus 49

The intervening years saw the 33 and 42 win more titles and races for Clark and Chapman, and the 49 brought yet another leap in performance.

The first to use a stressed-member engine in combination with the monocoque, it was yet another Chapman innovation which would be adopted by most others on the grid.

The power unit in question used the ground-breaking Cosworth DFV engine, Chapman negotiating exclusive use in its first season.

As feels natural, Clark would win on debut in the 42 at the 1967 Dutch GP, giving it a quick shakedown on Zandvoort’s cobbled streets.

He would win three more times that year, but reliability issues meant he lost out to the perhaps more pragmatic pairing of Denny Hulme and his Brabham BT24.

After Clark’s tragic death at the start of 1968, the 49 was still good enough for Graham Hill to pick the team up by winning his second drivers’ crown that year, and for Jochen Rindt to win at Monaco ’70.

In 1997, we asked former Lotus test and race driver John Miles to give the car a spin, which he was only too happy to do so, recalling how refined the car had become when he drove it.

“It feels very much as I remember it,” he said. “It has that same kind of debugged feel. When I first drove the 49 it had the benefit of three years of development and it gave you the impression that it would never let you down. The whole team knew the car inside out.”

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Lotus 79

Though more blue riband race cars came out of Hethel in the intervening years – the evergreen 72, and the revolutionary 78 – for many it is the 79 (produced for the 1978 season) which truly encapsulates the genius of Chapman.

The perfection of the ground-effect design first pioneered in the 78, its successor – in the hands of Mario Andretti – took a famous world title in the iconic black and gold John Player Special colours.

The American had said that its forerunner drove like it was “painted to the road”, and in the form of the 79 the ground-effect principle was devastating.

With an underbody designed as a wing in itself, and skirts attached to maintain the air pressure, it produced huge downforce. That underbody, unlike the 78, was extended to the rear wheels, further increasing the aerodynamic grip.

The car was only introduced for the sixth race of 1978 at Zolder, but it mattered not – Andretti took five wins in the 79, allowing him to achieve his F1 championship dream and returning Lotus to the top of the F1 pile.

In March 2010, Motor Sport drove 79/3, Andretti’s chassis of choice in his title year, at Classic Lotus’s Hethel test track:

“Statistically the 79 was far from the best grand prix car in the world: it was competitive for just one season – compare that to the 72 which won races in five consecutive years – and chalked up just six wins to its name. But it did change racing and stands today as one of the most iconic cars of its or any other era [and] it’s worth bearing in mind too that it was the last to win a World Championship.”

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