A crash in practice turned out to be the end of the Team Lotus at Indianapolis or any other Indycar race. The engine was mounted backwards so it could drive the centrally mounted 4WD transmission. Finally there was the Lotus 64, a four-wheel-drive, wedge car with big wings front and rear. There were other innovations too, that was the Colin Chapman way. They almost won too, were it not for mechanical failures at the end of the race. In 1968 Chapman joined the turbine revolution with a Lotus 56 that was a wedge-shaped and was powered by a turbine. Next came turbocharged engines, wings, advanced-aero and low-profile tyres. We know he did in in F1, but many people don’t know that he also did it in Ind圜ar (albeit briefly).Ĭhapman’s Lotus 29 Indycar of 1963 was part of a massive revolution by moving the engine from front to rear. His original thinking was extraordinary and when it came to racing he was able to leverage that originality into some of the most famous race cars ever built. It involves court cases and all sorts of other fun, but the net is that in 2012 Lotus Renault GP was rebranded as Lotus F1 Team and its cars were badged as Lotuses, while Team Lotus was renamed Caterham F1 Team and its cars were badged as Caterhams.Ĭolin Chapman was a man who liked to push limits and to break new ground. The new team used the Lotus name under licence from Group Lotus and was unrelated to the original Team Lotus. The team took a hiatus from F1 from 1994 till 2010 when a a new Malaysian team called Lotus Racing was awarded an entry. In all it had five Drivers’ Championships and one Constructors championship. Team Lotus continued to be a major player in Formula One up until the late 1980s. Major success came in 1963 with the Lotus 25, which won Team Lotus its first F1 World Constructors Championship. A Lotus Formula One car driven by Stirling Moss won the marque’s first Grand Prix in 1960 at Monaco. Lotus first entered Formula One through its sister company Team Lotus in 1958.

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