THE LAST HURRAH THE HISTORY OF LOTUS PART 4: 1977-84
When Niki Lauda first visited Fiorano he expressed surprise that Ferrari didn’t win all the time, such were the obvious advantages at its disposal. The sentiment fits 1970s Team Lotus too, except it was people, not just its own cutting-edge facilities, that lent ‘Britain’s Ferrari’ its true potency. First, no team had a force to match Colin Chapman: founder, visionary, pioneer, an inspirational and totemic leader on a never-ceasing quest to discover the next big thing. Then there was his fully-loaded workforce, a talented band of bluff designers, engineers and mechanics – all motor racing lifers – who were pulled along by his example, putting in (and putting up with) the endless string of all-nighters. Lotus was F1’s school of excellence and hard knocks, a mirror image of Chapman himself. Which inevitably meant it was also flawed. There was good reason why Lotus didn’t win as much as it should have.
The distractions and technical cul-de-sacs that had coloured the late 1960s and the brashly commercial decade that followed only intensified at Lotus as the age of the manufacturer superpowers dawned. Chapman and his intrepid band infuriated, slumping into the realms of mediocrity they had worked so hard to pull out from in the mid-1970s. But there was still time for one final gilt-edged black-and-gold season in F1’s sun-drenched uplands.
BUT THE REVOLUTION WAS ONLY AT A CANTER IN 1977: IT WOULD ACCELERATE TO FULL GALLOP IN 1978 AS ‘BLACK BEAUTY’ HIT ITS STRIDE
In the moment it was darkest before the
