How Senna’s first F1 winner gave Lotus life after Chapman

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 and Ligier engineer Gerard Ducarouge, who arrived in mid-1983 after a troubled spell at Alfa Romeo’s works team.

‘Duca’ wasn’t a pencils man. Alfa driver Bruno Giacomelli says he “never saw him at a drawing board”. What Ducarouge did was energise, galvanise and lead a design team which was accustomed to being directed by the hands-on Chapman. Arriving at Lotus’s Hethel base and appraising the team’s 1983 cars – the Cosworth-engined, actively suspended 92 and the Renault turbo-powered 93T – Ducarouge initiated a rush-redesign based on the tub and suspension of the 1982 cars.

Within five weeks the 94T was ready for action at the British Grand Prix, where Elio de Angelis qualified fourth – only to be undone by a slow start, followed by one of his Renault engine’s pistons making a bid for freedom. After an overnight electrical repair Nigel Mansell came through to fourth from 18th on the grid. It was the team’s best result since de Angelis won the 1982 Austrian GP by a whisker.

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A change to Goodyear rubber the following season proved to be the wrong choice as McLaren’s Michelin-shod MP4/2 proved quicker over race distances than the new 95T – and what the new TAG-Porsche engine might have been giving away to Renault in outright grunt it made up in reliability and fuel efficiency. A ban on in-race refuelling, combined with a maximum fuel tank size of 220 litres, acted as a cap on performance while punishing thirst, as when De Angelis was lucky to be classified third at San Marino when his 95T ran dry on the final lap.

The Lotus 97T had novelty bargeboard designs to get around the ban on lateral extensions on the rear wing

Photo by: James Mann

Neither was Warr greatly impressed with his two drivers, believing the urbane and well-bred De Angelis to be insufficiently hungry to succeed, and Mansell just not good enough at the top level. The Briton’s blunder at Monaco – putting a wheel on the white line in the wet and shunting out while leading – always rankled.

Aerodynamic tweaks and improved Goodyear tyres proved key the following year as Ducarouge’s team evolved the 95T into the 97T, integrating some ideas from the stillborn 96T Indycar project. The new car featured a significant novelty in the form of bargeboards between the nose and rear wheels, and a cunning circumvention of revised rules banning lateral extensions on the rear wing. Rather than eliminating them, Lotus fitted them to the sidepods ahead of the rear wheels.

There was also a new face in the cockpit. Warr had tried to employ Formula 3 hotshot Ayrton Senna for the 1984 season and got as far as agreeing terms – a bargain $50,000 – before title sponsor Player’s nixed the deal, preferring Mansell instead. Twelve months later Warr got his way, but in the interim Senna’s stellar maiden F1 season with Toleman had driven the rate card up. Now the asking price was $585,000.

Aerodynamic tweaks and improved Goodyear tyres proved key the following year as Ducarouge’s team evolved the 95T into the 97T, integrating some ideas from the stillborn 96T Indycar project

Nimbleness had been a strong suit of the previous car so the 97T retained the same core structure and pullrod-actuated suspension front and rear. This would be the last Lotus F1 car to be assembled in a hybrid fashion, with flat sheets of carbon and kevlar sandwiching an aluminium honeycomb reinforcement structure, folded, cut and bonded together like a traditional monocoque. Future Lotuses would embrace mouldings, as pioneered by McLaren.

In qualifying trim, with oversized Garrett turbochargers mated to a low-compression configuration of the 1.5-litre V6, and the wastegates capped, Renault’s new EF15 engine was reckoned to be good for around 1200bhp. For races Lotus would fit higher-compression engines with smaller turbos to improve frugality and reduce power lag.

While the Renault trailed the TAG-Porsche on reliability and efficiency, Senna’s focus and force of will elevated both car and team to another level. In a 2020 interview Chris Dinnage, Senna’s mechanic and now team manager of Classic Team Lotus, compared his experience of Mansell and Senna thus: “Ayrton had the same raw pace… but he was only using 50% of his capacity as a human to drive the car at full speed, leaving him the other 50% to be really aware of everything that was going on around him. His concentration levels were unparalleled — I’ve never met anyone else like him.”

PLUS: Ayrton Senna's 10 greatest Formula 1 races

Warr also noted with approval how Senna’s energy and enthusiasm percolated through the entire team. Gradually marginalised, De Angelis would take his leave at the end of 1985, enabling Warr to cast the net again for a driver he deemed more determined – but that would be another story…

Senna sparkled in the Lotus 97T, with which he'd take his maiden F1 pole and win at the Portuguese GP

Photo by: Sutton Images

In the 1985 season-opening Brazilian Grand Prix at Jacarepagua, De Angelis and Senna ran at the front in practice and qualifying, only to be demoted to the second row of the grid by last-gasp efforts from Michele Alboreto and Keke Rosberg. Race day was punishingly hot, but Senna looked secure in third place until his ignition system failed.

Next time out, at Estoril, Senna nailed his first pole position – a second faster than his team-mate and 0.4s than Brazilian GP winner Alain Prost’s McLaren. But come Sunday, dark clouds rolled in over the circuit, unleashing a torrent of rain.

Within the Lotus camp this evoked disquieting memories of Monaco the previous year, when Mansell had charged off into a seemingly unassailable lead and then crashed just as they were about to signal him to slow down. The mechanics ought to have drawn succour from Senna’s performance in that race, for it was Monaco in 1984 when Ayrton properly announced himself at the top level in motor racing.

PLUS: The underdog F1 squad that thrust Senna into the limelight

But he had never driven the 97T in the wet and his car had required an engine and gearbox change after the morning warm-up. Nerves in the Lotus garage remained jangled.

As the field got away Senna launched smoothly into the lead, receiving the bonus of De Angelis leaping from fourth to second and keeping the rest of the field at bay. Not that he seemed to require the help. Senna’s progress seemed imperious as even the finest drivers on the grid struggled: even silky-smooth Prost rotated into the barrier on the main straight when he ran over a puddle.

By lap 20 Senna had half a minute in hand over his team-mate, and although Ayrton (and others) began gesticulating to the officials to stop the race as conditions grew worse, it was allowed to run to the two-hour cut-off – by which time Senna had lapped everyone bar Alboreto, who had overhauled De Angelis for second place. Warr led a track invasion of Lotus mechanics in a moment of unadulterated joy captured by future GP Racing principal photographer Steven Tee.

“It was a hard, tactical race, corner by corner, lap by lap, because conditions were changing all the time,” recalled Senna in an interview later in his career. “The car was sliding everywhere – it was very hard to keep the car under control.

The 97T had enough grunt from its Renault engine to challenge the frontrunners, even if it did lack reliability and efficiency

Photo by: James Mann

“Once I had all four wheels on the grass, totally out of control, but the car came back on the circuit. People later said that my win in the wet at Donington in 1993 was my greatest performance – no way! I had traction control [for that race]…”

PLUS: The Senna victory that outclassed Donington '93

Lotus’s first victory in its post-Chapman era infused the team with optimism. “If we can make the car finish the races,” Warr told his mechanics, “he [Senna] is going to win the championship, simple as that.”

The process would not be as elementary as anticipated. Two weeks later, at Imola, Senna annexed pole again, tore off into an early lead, repelled a mid-race challenge from Prost, and was 10s up the road from the Stefan Johansson’s Ferrari when the Renault V6 began to draw fumes rather than fuel from the tank with four laps to go.

Senna’s progress seemed imperious as even the finest drivers on the grid struggled: even silky-smooth Prost rotated into the barrier

Johansson had the benefit of an electronic fuel readout but it was giving him a bum steer, and he too stopped after enjoying a single lap in the lead. Prost short-shifted his way to victory but was subsequently disqualified when his McLaren was found to be 2kg underweight. De Angelis gratefully inherited the win having finished 38s adrift of Prost, only seeing the finishing line because his car’s engine had long since turned the turbo boost down by itself.

Senna would claim five more pole positions that season but converted none of them into victory, thwarted by further reliability issues (and a self-inflicted impact with the wall in Detroit). In wet conditions at Spa he took another majestic victory, and a run of podiums at the back end of the season enabled him to finish fourth in the drivers’ championship.

Nevertheless there was a sense of disappointment – and the creeping realisation at Lotus that it had a lot of work to do to keep its new star on board…

The Lotus 97T took three wins and eight poles in total in the 1985 F1 season

Photo by: James Mann

Race record

Starts: 32  
Wins: 3  
Poles: 8   
Fastest laps: 3  
Podiums: 6   
Championship points: 71

Specification

Chassis: Carbon fibre/kevlar and aluminium honeycomb monocoque     
Suspension: Double wishbones with pullrod-actuated coil springs/dampers  
Engine: Twin-turbo V6    
Engine capacity: 1494cc   
Power: 820bhp @ 12500 rpm (race trim) 
Gearbox: Six-speed manual    
Brakes: Carbon discs front and rear   
Tyres: Goodyear   
Weight: 540kg    
Notable drivers: Ayrton Senna, Elio de Angelis

The Lotus 97T that helped Senna's F1 career truly take off despite its flaws

Photo by: James Mann