The troubled story of F1's greatest racing car

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."

The concept

There was no breakthrough innovation on the Lotus 72. Rather, Chapman took an integrated approach to designing an F1 car incorporating multiple concepts. That was hardly the norm of the times.

The 72 was defined by its wedge shape at a time when downforce-producing accoutrements were becoming increasingly important in F1 after their arrival circa 1968.
The wedge involved moving the radiators from the nose of the car to the sides behind the driver. That was part of Chapman's masterplan to shift the weight distribution rearwards in the name of traction.

PLUS: Formula 1's great Lotus landmarks - Lotus 72

"I wanted to make a real breakthrough... to build a motor car that was capable of development over a number of years" Colin Chapman

Inboard brakes at the front, as well as the rear, were part of the overall scheme that allowed - demanded even - that the new Lotus run a softer- construction front tyre, developed by Firestone, than its rivals.

The torsion-bar suspension was rising rate to give a supple ride, yet still able to cope with bumps and kerbs: the spring rates stiffened with increasing load. The geometry of the first iteration of the 72 also incorporated significant anti-dive at the front and anti-squat and anti-lift at the rear to give a more level ride.

Chapman retrospectively proclaimed in Autosport in January 1974, just as the 72 was meant to be superseded by the type 76: "I wanted to make a real breakthrough... to build a motor car that was capable of development over a number of years, since continual innovation puts you in continual trouble."

The genesis

The 72 wasn't the first Lotus wedge. The Lotus 56 gas-turbine USAC racer that fell a few laps short of winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1968 was loosely wedge-shaped. It was shortly followed by the most overt example, the unraced type 57 Formula 2 design that subsequently tested in Tasman spec as the 58 with a 2.5-litre DFW Cosworth.

The designer of the 57, Martin Waide, explains that the idea of the wedge had become ingrained in Lotus design culture by the time of the 72. He credits its origins to Richard Parker, an engineer at Lotus Components.

Waide, who subsequently replaced Philippe at Team Lotus on his departure for the Parnelli team in the autumn of 1971, recalls Chapman becoming frustrated by delays in the development of the Europa at Lotus Cars. His fix was to harness the resources of the proprietary racing car side of the business.

"The aerodynamics of the Europa were looked at in the windtunnel at MIRA and Richard proposed that you could get a drag reduction with the wedge," remembers Waide. "We wanted to see if a Kamm-tail [after German aerodynamicist Wunibald Kamm] incorporating a radiator duct was less draggy than a traditional nose-rad installation at the front."

Incorporating the wedge-like lines of the Europa into Lotus's racing cars was a no-brainer. The elliptical shape of a 1960s F1 car produced lift in both forward motion and yaw.
Lessons had been learned about weight distribution and transfer, as well as traction, with the four-wheel-drive type 63 of 1969.

It had proved to be a development blind alley for Lotus, just as it would for every manufacturer that experimented with it. But it at least partially explained the desire to shift the weight rearwards: the 72 had an approximate 35/65 front-to-rear split.

The suspension geometry incorporating what Pilbeam calls the 'antis' was inspired by one of the issues with the type 49, the 72's predecessor.

"There was a tendency of the nose to dip on the 49 when the driver got on the brakes," he explains. "The consensus back then was that the suspension should be much softer than it is today on F1 cars, which explains Chapman's ideas on the 72 and why in particular he wanted it to resist lift at the back under braking."

The car Rindt didn't want to race

The 72 endured a difficult childhood. It took some sorting, which probably wasn't helped by Lotus number one Jochen Rindt's antipathy towards the car. He'd raised his concerns with Chapman about the integrity of his cars back in 1969 and was quickly questioning the new design, according to Pilbeam, even before it hit the track.

"Chapman was the master of lightweight," recalls Pilbeam. "Everything was pared down to the minimum on the 72. The wishbones had quarter-inch bolts. Jochen looked at them and said, 'I'm not driving that.' They would have been OK: it had all been calculated properly. But we did change them, though only up to 5/16ths."

"Jochen told me he didn't want to drive the 72, but Colin said, 'Leave it to me'. He talked him round, as he always did. Jochen got in and all of a sudden he had a beautiful car underneath him" Herbie Blash

The first test of the 72 took place at the Lotus Cars Hethel track on 6 April in what doubled as a low-key press launch. Rindt immediately felt something was wrong with the car. His suspicions were confirmed two weeks later on the car's debut in the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama, when Rindt suffered a failure of the left-front brake shaft in practice and team-mate John Miles failed to qualify. The Austrian (pictured below inspecting the suspension at Jarama) would declare after his retirement with electrical problems that he wasn't going to drive the car again.

Rindt was, however, back aboard a 72 the following weekend for the Silverstone International Trophy non-points race after some rapid modifications at the start of a development programme that quickly took the car through a short-lived B specification to C-spec. Lotus didn't even arrive at the track until second practice had already started on Friday afternoon.

Rindt did get his way for Monaco, though. Back in the 49, now in C-spec, he produced one of his greatest performances to catch Jack Brabham and pressure him into a final-corner mistake to claim victory.

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The 72 was initially hamstrung by its radical suspension, which was locking up under load.

"The car wasn't reacting as it should because what we'd done on the geometry was probably a bit too aggressive," recalls Pilbeam. "The drivers lost a bit of feel."

Lotus mechanic Dave Sims remembers the drivers suggesting that the car seemed to have "a hinge in middle" in its earliest form. "The front would be great in one corner, and then at the next the rear would be good and the front would be doing nothing," he says.

That led to a major redesign. Removing the anti-squat and anti-lift at the rear was relatively straightforward, but taking off the anti-dive at the front involved significant work to the monocoque. Herbie Blash, a contemporary of Sims at Lotus, remembers the early days of the 72 as "just a blur" as the crew worked "day and night".

Team Lotus turned up to the Belgian GP at Spa in June with a pair of substantially revised 72s, one with rear-suspension revisions and the second with 'antis' removed at the front and back. Rindt, however, still raced his 49C. He also wanted to race the older car next time out at the Dutch GP in June.

"Jochen told me he didn't want to drive the 72, but Colin said, 'Leave it to me'," recalls Blash. "He talked him round, as he always did. Jochen got in and all of a sudden he had a beautiful car underneath him."

Rindt scored a dominant first victory for the 72. He claimed pole and was exactly half a minute ahead of Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell-run March 701 at the finish. It was the first of four wins on the trot for the Austrian and the new Lotus. They were bookended by an epic slipstreamer at the pre-chicane Hockenheimring in which the car came out on top in a back-and-forth battle with Jacky Ickx's Ferrari 312B. In between, there were a pair of fortuitous victories at Clermont-Ferrand and Brands Hatch.

The British GP success was doubly lucky. Rindt won when Brabham's BT33 spluttered out of fuel two corners from home, and Lotus then survived a post-race scrutineering scare. The car was initially excluded when its rear wing was found to be too high, before being reinstated three and a half hours after the finish of Team Lotus's home race.

Tragedy at Monza

Rindt still hankered after racing his 49 at Monza in September in spite of these successes. "Jochen wanted the 49 at Monza the weekend he died," recalls Sims. "I remember Jochen having a go at Maurice when he found out the team hadn't brought it. He reckoned he could outdrive anybody in that car."

Rindt would die after crashing his 72 in practice on Saturday. Lotus experimented running without front and rear wings in pursuit of straightline speed, and also went higher on the gear ratios. But what caused the car to pitch hard left into the barriers as he braked for Parabolica isn't clear.

"We're talking about removing the wings from a car designed with them. It made the thing very unstable. I remember Denny Hulme telling me that Jochen had gone past him at one point and was all over the road" Dave Sims

The official investigation by the Italian authorities pointed to a failure of the right-front brake shaft, but Sims isn't convinced.

"It broke all right, but did it cause the accident or did it break in the accident?" he says. "We're talking about removing the wings from a car designed with them. It made the thing very unstable.

"The Old Man [Chapman] saw Rindt's times and told me to get the wings off Miles's car. He did a slow lap, tried to get on it and then came straight in. When he took his helmet off, he was as white as a sheet.

"I remember [McLaren driver] Denny Hulme telling me that Jochen had gone past him at one point and was all over the road. He said he had to back off to get out of the way."

The front of the Lotus was ripped off as it went under the crash barrier. Rindt, who never wore a crotch strap, submarined in the cockpit and sustained unsurvivable throat injuries.

His five wins, however, meant Rindt's points tally was still 20 more than that of his nearest rivals Stewart and Brabham with three races to run. The title was awarded to him posthumously after the US GP at Watkins Glen, a race won by the 72 driven by rookie Emerson Fittipaldi.

The tricky second season

The 72 may have won five grands prix in its debut year and played a major role in propelling Rindt to the world title, but Lotus went off the boil in year two of the car. There were multiple factors involved.

What shouldn't be overlooked is that Team Lotus raced with two F1 novices in 1971. Fittipaldi had fortuitously won at the Glen after becoming de facto team leader in the wake of Rindt's death, a role made permanent on Lotus's failure to recruit an experienced number one. The Brazilian had only five world championship GPs under his belt when he pitched up at the opening race of the new season. His team-mate Reine Wisell had started only two F1 races.

Their first full seasons of F1 coincided with one of the major technical developments in the history of GP racing: the introduction of the low-profile slick tyre by Firestone at the Spanish GP at the Parc de Montjuic in Barcelona in April (below).

Lotus and its inexperienced drivers struggled to adapt what became the 72D at Monaco to the new tyres, though Fittipaldi claimed in the wake of a winless season that his thoughts were too quickly discounted: "I always told Colin something was wrong with the car and nobody would believe me because I was too new a driver."

Poor reliability didn't help, and development was held back by finances - or rather a lack of them.

"We did our testing in practice and qualifying," says Wisell. "We didn't have much budget; Lotus was very low on money."

There was also the distraction of a Chapman pet project: the Lotus 56. Now in F1 B-spec, the turbine machine competed in three GPs, the same number of non-championship events and a Formula 5000 race at Hockenheim.

A return to form - a second title

Lotus started to get on top of the Firestone slicks as the 1971 season wore on. There were suspension tweaks through the campaign, including a change from magnesium to fabricated steel uprights to cope with the increased forces, and only as the season approached its end did the consistency of handling that Fittipaldi craved finally return.

Waide saw his first job for 1972 as addressing the fragility of the car: "I set to and looked at the safety and reliability aspects of the car and eliminated the parts that I regarded as problematic." These included the wheelhubs, the redesign of which was handed to a newbie in the Team Lotus design office, Geoff Aldridge.

"It was almost like a different car - it was perfect. They'd also fixed all the things that broke. That was important because you have to trust in the car" Rene Wisell

The latest 72 also incorporated an anvil-shaped airbox, so much a part of the definitive black-and-gold look of the car on the switch from Gold Leaf to John Player Special branding. The new arrangement and the colours, which coincided with an increased financial input from John Player & Sons tobacco, stayed on the car until the end of its career in 1975.

"It was a bit of a joke, but it was highly effective," recalls Waide. "After the first one came out of the mould, someone parked it next to my drawing board with a horseshoe and a hammer on top."

PLUS: How Chapman's wonder wedge won Fittipaldi's heart

There was also a tidy-up of the airflow at the rear of the car with a new oil tank and mounting for a bigger rear wing. This moved aft over the course of the year and also briefly incorporated a controversial revision to the wing mounting.

The developments created a car that felt entirely different to the 1971-spec Lotus. Wisell, who was brought back to replace the unsuccessful Dave Walker for the final two races of 1972 (and pictured below at Mosport), couldn't believe the difference.

"It was almost like a different car - it was perfect," recalls the Swede. "They'd also fixed all the things that broke. That was important because you have to trust in the car. In 1971, I was keeping a small percentage spare - I wasn't driving 100%."

Fittipaldi was imperious in 1972. He won five GPs, and three non-championship events, as he raced to the world title. He was crowned as the then-youngest champion at 25 after his fifth win at Monza with two races left to run.

"Emerson had an amazing focus that you only see in the highest-level sportsmen," says Waide. "I'd watch him in the 15 minutes before the start of a race and see how he built himself up into the zone. He was fantastic that year, absolutely brilliant."

Three more GP victories followed for Fittipaldi in 1973, while new team-mate Ronnie Peterson won four times. The Lotus 72E, now on Goodyear tyres, won the constructors' title, but its drivers could only finish second and third to Stewart at Tyrrell.

The dynamic within the team changed for 1973 with two strong drivers alongside each other. Trevor Seaman, number-one mechanic on Fittipaldi's car, reckons it "took the edge off" his driver's season. Peterson, he suggests, was Lotus team manager Peter Warr's favourite.

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"Peter had been doing everything for Emerson in 1972, but in 1973 it was 'Ronnie this and Ronnie that'," recalls Seaman. "I think that put Emerson's nose out of joint because he thought he wasn't getting the attention he had before."

The ill-fated replacement

The 72 continued to win races in its fifth season in 1974. Peterson won three GPs, the same number as world champion Fittipaldi after his move to McLaren with Marlboro's dollars. Chapman's original plan, however, was for the type 72 to be in the museum by the season's end.

Ralph Bellamy, who had joined Lotus in late 1972, was charged with designing a successor to the 72 but, said Chapman, "100lb lighter". The Australian describes the type 76 as "a tidied-up 72", though it incorporated a new radiator layout and, at his boss's insistence, an electric clutch operated via a button atop the gear lever.

Lotus had fallen down the development pecking order at Goodyear, partly because the new car hadn't been ready for pre-season testing. Both the 72 and 76 couldn't work the harder tyres designed for its competitors

This innovation, which incorporated twin brake pedals so the driver could use his left foot for retardation, was rapidly abandoned, as was the car itself. Bellamy reckons that Warr took against the 76, arguing that it was overweight and also overheated.

He argues that the former was a result of the trick transmission, the latter courtesy of the intervention of Chapman on the grid at Jarama, where Peterson had qualified second for the 1974 Spanish GP.

It had rained just before the cars went out, and Chapman noticed that oil temperatures were low, so insisted that the mechanics tape up the radiators. Peterson led until pitting for slicks. A couple of laps later, he was out with an overheating engine.

"The oil temperatures were down because the coolers were getting doused with water," says Bellamy. "There was nothing wrong with the cooling, but one of the crosses on which the car was crucified was that it overheated. The other was that it understeered, but that was no different to the 72."

Lotus had fallen down the development pecking order at Goodyear, partly because the new car hadn't been ready for pre-season testing. Both the 72 and 76, which retained its predecessor's rearward weight distribution, couldn't work the harder tyres designed for its competitors. Understeer was the result.

"A lot of Ronnie's success was down to him," says Bellamy. "Around Monte Carlo he could hurl the car around and overcome the tyre issue."

With the two 76s parked, the 72 continued for a sixth season in 1975. Peterson failed to make it onto the podium, though Jacky Ickx, who'd joined the team in 1974, finished second at Montjuic. The Belgian would leave the team shortly afterwards, having by his own admission "lost confidence in the car" after multiple brake-shaft failures.

Team Lotus looked pretty much lost as it constantly evolved the 72, which was given the F suffix mid-season, to try to get back towards the front of the grid.

"We were going from long wheelbase to short wheelbase, wide track to narrow track and torsion bars to coil springs," recalls mechanic Ian Dawson. "Nothing made a lot of difference; it just ended up being a lot of work."

The 72's legacy

The failure - or perhaps unwillingness - of Team Lotus to replace the 72 set in motion a long-term programme to evaluate what an F1 car should be. Chapman hauled former BRM man Tony Rudd, who'd been working on road cars and engineering projects at Lotus since late 1969, back into the racing arena in late 1974. In turn, he brought Peter Wright into his team.

"Chapman would talk to anyone who'd listen about what was wrong with the GP car," says Wright. "Tony's brief was to rethink F1 design and we went back to first principles."

The 'rethink' included an aerodynamic programme in the Imperial College rolling-road windtunnel. There Wright and Rudd worked out how to harness the airflow under the car. The failings of the 72 in its dotage would ultimately result in something it never was: a gamechanger, and it was called the Lotus 78.