LOTUS 97T
Colin Chapman’s death in 1982 ought to have been the end of Lotus. Not just a visionary engineer in his own right, Chapman was Lotus’s wheeler-dealer and a pusher, chivvier and charmer who could extract brilliance from his design team. He defined the organisation in all its magnificent but often fragile glory. Not for nothing did former Lotus sales director Graham Arnold describe Chapman as “an incredible bloke who could do anything better than the next man. If he’d been in charge of the Royal Shakespeare Company, within a year he’d have produced the definitive Macbeth, the most controversial Macbeth or even the most controversially definitive Macbeth…”
Into the breach stepped Peter Warr, the long-time team manager recently returned from a spell at Wolf. The deeply practical Warr had spent many years acting as a foil to Chapman’s more impetuous instincts and somehow managed to steer Team Lotus through the chaos which followed Chapman’s death. Among his most inspired hirings was ex-Matra
