THE TROUBLED STORY OF F1’S FINEST
At the back end of 1969, Lotus boss Colin Chapman removed himself from the day-to-day running of his growing organisation, locked himself away and set to roughing out the design of the following year’s grand prix challenger. What he emerged with after two weeks were the first sketches of an innovative racing machine that became the type 72.
Some have claimed that the Lotus 72, powered by Cosworth’s increasingly ubiquitous DFV, was a game-changer. Yet it didn’t send the opposition racing back to the drawing board in the same way as the type 78 and 79 ground-effect chassis did later in the 1970s. There’s a stronger argument that it was the first modern F1 car: no longer cigar-tube in shape, its layout and architecture remain familiar to this day. But what’s indisputable is its place among the all-time greatest GP cars. The 72 took Team Lotus to a pair of drivers’ world championships, three constructors’ titles and 20 GP victories over a protracted six-year lifespan.
Chapman and Lotus chief designer Maurice Philippe are generally co-credited with the 72. But the story of how the former put himself into what, as an intuitive designer always on the lookout for the unfair advantage, he no doubt regarded as splendid isolation suggests otherwise.
The tale is recounted by Mike Pilbeam, who joined the three-man Team Lotus design team alongside Philippe and Geoff Ferris from BRM in 1969. He has no doubts that the 72 was “Chapman’s baby”. “Colin came to us and said, ‘I’m going to do a bit of drawing on the new car’,” says Pilbeam. “He disappeared into his office and no one saw him at a time when things were quite fraught financially for the company. He wouldn’t talk to anybody.
“He came out at the end with quarter-scale drawings of the 72 and gave them to Maurice, Geoff and me, and said, ‘There you go, make that work.’ Maurice undoubtedly had an input, but I would say that most of the ideas were Colin’s.”
