A Look At Lotus Top Performing F1 Machines!

Lotus won the Formula One race for the first time at the 1960 Monaco Grand Prix. BUT, the Lotus car that won the race was NOT from Team Lotus! It was privately owned and entered by Rob Walker, and piloted by Stirling Moss. The Lotus Team had to wait another 18 months to win its first Grand Prix in the F1 world championship. However, Team Lotus has more than made up for its late start, with Lotus chassis winning 79 races and Team Lotus winning 13 world titles. Lotus was much more than just fantastic performances, since the history of Lotus F1 cars also traces much of F1's run of major technical breakthroughs. 

Five of the cars, beginning with the Lotus 18, which won the inaugural historic race, demonstrate the pioneering engineering and breadth of creativity. Let's start at the beginning, with the car that took Lotus F1 to its maiden victory. Despite intermittent rain and an unscheduled pitstop to fix a detached plug that dropped him a cylinder, Stirling Moss in a Rob Walker Lotus 18 won the 1960 Monaco Grand Prix by nearly a minute, having clinched pole position by a second. And, of course, a year later at the Principality, Moss utilised a Lotus 18 to beat Ferrari to win in a drive that went down in history, before doing something similar at the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

Lotus 18

The 18 was, nevertheless, a notable car in and of itself. It was Lotus's first mid-engined rival, and it outperformed its predecessors significantly. It also helped Lotus finish second in the F1 constructors' table in 1960 and 1961. Though, it must be mentioned, Moss played a significant role in this. The 18 was also successful outside of Formula One, particularly in Formula Junior, where it is estimated that 125 FJunior Lotus 18s were built. 

 

The Lotus 25 was the first monocoque Formula One vehicle, debuting in 1962. However, Chapman failed to explain its advantages to Lotus client teams, to whom he had just sold spaceframe Lotus 24s and convinced them that the 25 was nearly identical. “I see what you mean, you just forgot to put the chassis in this one,” John Cooper observed after peering inside the cockpit of the 25.

Lotus 25

The monocoque has a number of advantages. It was significantly stiffer, allowing the car to be lighter and more compact. Chapman's major motivation was to create a smaller frontal area – he reduced it by 17% – and make up for F1's 1.5-litre engine requirement introduced the previous year, which made cars a little breathless on the straights. 

 

When the Lotus 72 was introduced in 1970, one can only guess what its contemporaries thought of it. And, as befitting such a massive forward stride, the car has stood the test of time in every way. You may argue that this is the first machine to have the appearance of a modern Formula One vehicle. The water-cooling radiator was moved from the front to the sides of the car by Chapman and Maurice Philippe, allowing a wedge-shaped nose to minimise drag and lift while also improving airflow over the car to the back wing. Behind the driver's head, the 72 had a highly modern-looking airbox.

Lotus 72

In 1970, Jochen Rindt won a crushing, but posthumous, title. Even as late as 1974, the vehicle was still winning many Grands Prix. It won three constructors' titles, two drivers' titles, and a total of 20 world championship grand prix victories. It is often considered to be F1's most successful car, with a five-year win streak that is the most enduring. At the end of the 1975 season, Team Lotus was still utilising it. 

When Formula One first started using negative-incidence aerodynamics in earnest in the late 1960s, it was nearly entirely done through airflow over the car. However, this was not the case for everyone. BRM designers Peter Wright and Tony Rudd experimented with the idea of turning the entire automobile into a wing.

Lotus 79

 Their earlier efforts, as well as a comparable one on the March 701, failed for various reasons. Nonetheless, by the mid-1970s, Wright and Rudd were at Lotus, with access to the team's resources and a leader in Chapman, who, with the team mired in a drought, was eager to find the next unfair edge. After spending several hours in Imperial College's wind tunnel, Wright and Rudd determined that sealing the sides of the automobile to keep the low pressure inside was critical, which was eventually accomplished with flexible sliding skirts. The downforce increases were incredible, yet the drag penalty was negligible. The Lotus 78, which raced in 1977, led the pace for the year and should have won the championships, but its engines were unreliable. But, in 1978, the Lotus 79 fixed this, as well as a few other issues like the car's excessive drag. Lotus cruised to a double championship victory. It turned out to be the team's final championship. 

Unlike the majority of the others on this list, this one did not have a lot of success. It did, however, show that Lotus' propensity for significant innovation lasted almost to the end.  

Lotus 99T in it's distinctive Camel livery

 Instead of employing more typical dampers and springs, ‘active' digital suspension kept the car at an ideal ride height over bumps, through curves, and the like. Lotus created the technique in 1981, during a period when a consistent shallow pitch-free ground clearance was critical.

It was used on one Lotus car in the first two rounds of 1983 because Chapman felt its non-turbocharged car required something more. However, it proved to be too heavy, undeveloped, and unreliable, so it was put on hold. Lotus reintroduced active suspension with the 99T in 1987, largely at the request of then-owner General Motors, who saw benefits for Lotus cars, and Ayrton Senna won two races, while Williams acknowledged it by emulating it late in the year with its "reactive" system. 

Senna's triumph, however, was widely regarded as having occurred despite active suspension, which remained burdensome and cost both power and developmental attention. It wasn't a dead duck, either, because by 1992, the formidable Williams FW14B had perfected its system and was crushing all opposition.