How a champion turned "rubbish bin" came back to life

Formula 1's youngest world champion sat trapped aboard his Lotus 72, feet pinched and ankles badly bruised. It would be 20 minutes before Emerson Fittipaldi was freed; a painful blow for his title defence, which had been ignited by successive wins in the 1973 season-opening Argentinian and Brazilian Grands Prix.

Come the Dutch race, round 10 of 15, the 26-year-old needed to bounce back after two straight retirements. He was on course to do just that, and was topping the qualifying times at Zandvoort behind the wheel of 72/5, in which he'd scored four world championship victories and a further three non-championship triumphs, making it the most successful of the 10 chassis built.

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But as Fittipaldi stitched together another flier, the front-left wheel centre failed. He skated into the barrier, the wheel and suspension puncturing the car's chassis.

As Denis Jenkinson wrote for Motor Sport magazine, "A look at the wreckage afterwards gave cause to think he got off very lightly indeed." Fittipaldi would remarkably start the race aboard 72/7, but withdrew after only two laps.

Looking more like a crushed beer can than a machine capable of winning three constructors' crowns, 72/5 would be recovered to Team Lotus's Hethel base. But Colin Chapman - in search of his next technical innovation, and more workshop space - was not one to look back. That left the car to sit dormant in the hangar used to house his twin-prop Piper PA-31 Navajo. That 72/5 was retained at all comes as some surprise to Chapman's son Clive.

"The tub was crushed into a little ball at the front," he recalls. "Most of the other damaged chassis that the team has had over the years have just been thrown away.

"But for some reason this one was kept. I remember it. It was used as something of a rubbish bin for some time and then it ended up with a load of technical drawings stuffed inside."

It would be 40 years before 72/5's rebirth would be considered, the latter time filled by Classic Team Lotus's bustling historic racing and restoration programmes. When the green light came, the lead mechanic was Kevin Smith - alongside his principal task of preparing and running numerous CTL customer-owned cars, such as Jim Clark's 1967 Indianapolis 500 Type 38/7, winner of the Royal Automobile Club Restoration of the Year award in 2019.

"The chassis was in such a bad state, though. The front subframe was missing, the front-left-hand corner was like tissue paper, just crumpled up" Ken Smith

"We didn't dig it out of the hangar and start finding all the parts until 2012," says Smith, who also helped Adrian Newey restore his 49B. "It would normally have been scrapped because it was in a pretty bad state. Some things you look at and think, 'Oh, I'll repair that'. Other things, 'Not a chance'. This was closer to the latter."

Job number one was to straighten 72/5's monocoque, the aluminium taking stubbornly to the persuasions of a hammer and dolly. That was the task for Steve Jest (then of Competition Fabrications, now at CTL).

"The chassis was the toughest part of the whole project," Smith says. "It takes time to find out which parts should be on it, what spec it should be, but it's not what you'd call hard. The chassis was in such a bad state, though. The front subframe was missing, the front-left-hand corner was like tissue paper, just crumpled up."

In time, the tub was repaired - with roughly three quarters of the original skins intact - and mated to a period-built Hewland five-speed gearbox before being unveiled at the Autosport International show in January 2014.

To preserve the car's provenance, it was decided not to repaint the chassis. As such, in its naked state, the red of 72/5's previous Gold Leaf livery - worn when Fittipaldi scored his first F1 championship win in the 1970 US GP - can still be seen along panel join lines and under rivet heads, along with overspray inside the fuel-tank bays.

The brief from Chapman was to return 72/5 - the favourite machine of Fittipaldi that he had come to know as 'Old Faithful' - to exactly the spec it ran in at Zandvoort. Thankfully, three drawers full of technical drawings and photographs would aid the project.

"Some parts, including all the uprights and some bodywork, I found in the stores," says Smith. "The fuel hatches I found boxed in another completely different area. For some reason they were kept, and some were mangled but we managed to salvage them. We knew they were for this exact car because the paintwork matched, and all the holes lined up."

Several components, including the original front wishbones, could be located too. But X-rays revealed they should not be reused, even if 72/5 was always going to return as a demonstration car rather than take on a second life in historic competition.

Like the gearbox, an original three-litre Cosworth DFV V8 - #130 - was fitted and, in February 2019, 72/5 fired into life for the first time in almost 46 years. Given the front had borne the brunt of the impact at Zandvoort, the very same rear wing could
be straightened and refitted. Same for the right-hand sidepod.

Although the restoration had started without an exact deadline, the announcement that Team Lotus was to be celebrated at the 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed meant 72/5 had to be ready for a run up the hill. Adding to the pressure, Fittipaldi sent a video to the CTL crew saying he wanted to drive the car once again.

Before the double world champion could be properly reunited with the car, 72/5 first required a shakedown. Usually that is left to CTL team manager Chris Dinnage but, in appreciation of Smith's dedication and long service, Chapman and Dinnage offered him 20 laps - one tour of the 2.2-mile Hethel test track per year with CTL.

"I only needed a handful of laps, eight I think, just to make sure it pointed in the right direction, the brakes worked, the gears were all there," says Smith. "There was no nose, no front wing - they were still in build. I had the screen, the rear wing on and the sidepods. There were no teething problems whatsoever.

"At the time, I didn't really think about it too much. That was my job, checking everything was OK. It doesn't really affect you thinking it was the 72 that Emerson drove. It didn't hit me until later on. That's when I thought, 'Wow!'.

"The position was exactly the same, the padding on the back of the seat on my original one from 1973, the day I crashed" Emerson Fittipaldi

"It was a fabulous car to drive. You feel part of it. You can't imagine how they used to just rag them around the track so hard. They were very brave back then - flat chat and sideways."

Before the rebuilt 72 made its public debut at the FoS in July, it had to star in Autosport's 1000th F1 world championship race celebratory issue (11 April 2019). In turn, it needed to look stellar in front of a camera lens.

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That track test would be the first time 72/5 ran with all of its bodywork in place, and it was only at midnight the previous day that the 18-carat-gold pinstripe of the John Player Special livery was finally applied and varnished. For the subsequent 76, Team Lotus moved to signwriting paint that would show up better on TV.

"Of all the things I've done at Classic Team Lotus, chassis #5 was right up there," says Smith. "I've worked on so many projects, but what finished that one off for me was when I saw Emerson drive it at Goodwood. He sat in the car and got very tearful. That made it a lot more special.

"Over time, you do treat these machines as just cars. You know the history of it, but you work on so many. When I saw the emotion come across Emerson's face, that put in perspective what that car actually meant to someone else and what we gave back."

What Fittipaldi was given back was his original chassis, repaired, fitted with its pioneering sidepod-mounted radiators and resplendent in its JPS livery after a rebuild that had lasted the best part of eight years. It marked the return to health of the most-loved example of one of F1's great gamechangers.

Speaking at the FoS - the most recent outing for 72/5 given the pandemic - Fittipaldi said: "I was so much into that car because it was the most important part of my life. My sports life was chassis #5.

"The car has been at Norfolk at the factory for 45 years. It was very emotional for me to go back to the car. Very special.

"When I first sit down, I had all the memories before driving the car. I started thinking of great wins, great dices with Jackie Stewart, who was very tough. The position was exactly the same, the padding on the back of the seat on my original one from 1973, the day I crashed."

Tears wiped away, Fittipaldi donned his helmet and took to the Goodwood hill. The DFV resonated off the Flint Wall, paint flashing in the sun, the airbox barely visible over the hay bales lining the course. Given how well 72/5 was turned out by CTL, only the well-versed might have guessed at its quiet, past life in the corner of a hangar.