The man who shaped the Formula 1 car

Adrian Newey is labelled with increasing regularity as the GOAT of Formula 1 racing car design. Greatest of All Time? It’s a phrase used often and too lightly. Although for Newey, there is a strong case to be made: longevity of service stretching beyond 40 years, a span within which his epochal cars have achieved an unmatched roster of 26 world championships spread across three teams.

Since the late 1980s, no other individual has inspired and influenced F1 design more than Newey.

Yet as with racing drivers, GOAT statements on designers and engineers exist on shaky ground. Can we really compare Newey in a ‘devil’s in the detail’ era to those who broke through the big technical boundaries in chassis design and aerodynamics, free from constricting regulations? Not really. It’s safer to say that he’s carrying the torch lit by the icon who inspired him first: Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman. 

It’s hardly a coincidence that Newey owns and has raced a Gold Leaf Lotus 49B, the car that caught his child’s eye in the first place. Without Colin Chapman, there would be no Adrian Newey. But a like-for-like comparison between the two – the notion of which Newey would surely hate, by the way – doesn’t stand up.

Both were/are ‘designers’ within the catch-all term, but Chapman from the mid-1950s to his death in December 1982 was so much more: he literally shaped what we know as F1 today, as the founder of Lotus, as an intuitive engineer and as a visionary leader who inspired the many great people drawn to his flame. He stands beside Enzo Ferrari as F1’s greatest team owner.

Chapman was driven solely and completely by innovation, but he wasn’t necessarily first with every breakthrough. Who is? Nearly everything has a precedent. But he tended to cotton on quickly to anything that represented a fresh opportunity, caught the zeitgeist and boldly carried it into new, uncharted territories. 

Colin Chapman with his wife Hazel, who played an essential role in Lotus’s success – including providing £25 seed capital

Photo by: Motorsport Images

But his was never a solo narrative. From the beginning, he relied upon a weighty cast of supporting characters – not least the person who knew him best, and is most overlooked: his wife Hazel.

“There’s no way Dad would have achieved what he did without Mum,” says Clive Chapman, who through Classic Team Lotus keeps his parents’ flame alive today. “They started the company together and Mum was heavily involved until she started having a family. Even then she was Colin’s number one counsel.”

It was Hazel, whom Colin met in 1944, who put up the £25 he needed to start Lotus Engineering Co Ltd in 1952. She was by his side through the crucial formative years. 

“Mum was as brave as he was and didn’t stand on ceremony. She identified the important matter quicker than anyone and how to go about solving it” Clive Chapman

Born on 19 May 1928, Chapman learned to fly aeroplanes while he was earning a degree in civil engineering at University College London, then spent a short time in the RAF. Aircraft were always a passion and an influence, inspiring his signature ‘added lightness’ philosophy that was instilled further by his time working for the British Aluminium company.

By 1954, Lotus was fully airborne as production of an increasingly admired range of lightweight sportscars took off.

“Mum was as brave as he was and didn’t stand on ceremony,” continues Clive. “She identified the important matter quicker than anyone and how to go about solving it. Mum and Dad hooked up with the Allen brothers [Nigel and Michael, with whom they co-founded Lotus] and then Mike Costin, who was a vital figure for Team Lotus in the early days.

Fittipaldi became F1’s then-youngest world champion in 1972

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch / Getty Images

“There was a series of really able chief mechanics and then later other people such as designers Len Terry and Maurice Phillippe. It’s a long list: people like Peter Wright with whom Dad worked. So many have good, clever ideas but don’t get it done, whereas Dad would attract people to get it done as a team.”

Motor racing, first via the 750 Motor Club, was a vibrant laboratory for Chapman to explore and test his ideas, and it helped that he was a handy pedaller himself, to a degree that could have carried him to F1 as a racing driver had he been so minded.

Instead, his growing expertise in multi-tubular spaceframe chassis and suspension design led to a consultancy role for Vanwall. Chapman drew a lightweight chassis frame, new suspension system, and introduced aerodynamicist Frank Costin who was responsible for Lotus bodies.

Costin came up with the famous teardrop shape, for a company that would undercut BRM as Britain’s first F1 world champion constructor.

For Chapman, F1 hadn’t been his obsession or intention. That changed quickly through the late 1950s and into the swinging decade that followed.

Cooper and true-grit Aussie Jack Brabham were first in the British-led rear-engined revolution that turned F1 front to back, but it was Lotus and Jim Clark that defined the 1960s.

What might Clark – who had such a close bond with Chapman – have achieved in a Lotus 72?

Photo by: Getty Images

There were other partnerships and stars, of course: Graham Hill and BRM, John Surtees and Ferrari, Dan Gurney, a rejuvenated Brabham mid-decade, Jackie Stewart. Never has F1 been so blessed by such talent and character, in a final ‘age of innocence’ before F1’s technicolour commercial explosion.

But for all that quality, Clark was usually a clear head above the rest – when Chapman gave him what he needed, which invariably he did. Twenty-five GP wins from 72 starts spanning six and a bit years (plus 19 non-championship F1 wins), for two world championships, an Indianapolis 500 win that changed American racing for ever, Formula 2 and Tasman titles, even a British Saloon Car Championship crown in a Cortina… Clark and Chapman set the high-water mark for racing driver-team owner/designer alliances.

Andy Middlehurst was in a pushchair when his father took him to Oulton Park to witness Clark win a BSCC round in a Lotus Cortina. Now he has raced Clark-era Lotus cars more than anyone.

“The handling is always perfect and they turn in nicely; you can control everything on the throttle” Andy Middlehurst 

“Quite often on a single day at Hethel I’ve tested a Type 18, 21, 24 and 25 one after the other, which is interesting to see how things changed, from spaceframe to monocoque,” says Middlehurst, who has won nine F1 races at Goodwood’s Revival and five more at Monaco’s classic GP in Clark’s 1963 Lotus 25 R4.

“The cars were generally built for Clark’s frame. He was 5ft 7in, so if you are tall you tend not to fit so easily.

“The handling is always perfect and they turn in nicely; you can control everything on the throttle. They are almost perfect, but each one has a little quirk for you to get used to.

Clark/Chapman bagged British Saloon Car Championship crown with a Cortina

“If you look at a Spitfire, it’s made from aluminium skins stretched across bulkheads. The Lotus 25 is the Spitfire of the race tracks. But Lotuses are built to just about survive a grand prix: fragile, light and every component safe just about to the length of a GP.”

That’s why perhaps the most telling statistic of Clark’s F1 career was that he finished second only once in a GP, nursing a sick engine to trail Surtees’s Ferrari home at the Nurburgring in 1963. When Lotus’s notorious reliability held up, he tended to win.

What might Clark have achieved in a Lotus 72? Or a Type 79 ‘wing car’, for that matter? His death in a minor F2 race at Hockenheim in April 1968 rubbed out such possibilities. Thereafter, F1 was never – could never – be the same for Chapman.

He’d find other muses to ignite the fire but, as Clive puts it, “He was never going to find that connection again. They were so close.”

The driver who came nearest was Mario Andretti. He and Chapman met for the first time at Indy in 1965, when the rookie finished third behind Clark and Parnelli Jones in the 500. “At the banquet we were saying our goodbyes,” Andretti recalls.

“I said, ‘Colin, I would like to do F1 someday’. He said, ‘Mario, when you think you’re ready, call me and I’ll have a car’. Three years later, he had a car and called and I had my very first race with him.”

1965 Indianapolis 500 win changed North American racing forever

Photo by: Getty Images

That was Watkins Glen 1968, where at the first time of asking Andretti stuck the Lotus 49B on pole position. “Mario said to Dad, ‘Just let me know when you want me to put it on pole, Colin’. And he did,” reflects Clive. “Dad said to Bob [Dance, Lotus’s legendary chief mechanic], ‘It’s just like Jimmy’s back in the team’.”

It wasn’t yet time for Andretti to fully commit to F1. Instead, Jochen Rindt became the new Lotus muse. But his was a tense relationship with Chapman, the Austrian writing to his boss, in a letter that went public, to berate him for the obsession with weight loss at the expense of safety.

“I can only drive a car in which I have some confidence,” wrote Rindt in May 1969, “and I feel the point of no confidence is quite near.”

“When the car wasn’t very good, Colin had perception and intuition. I’d describe every corner, and he’d say, ‘I know what to do the next day to go much faster’” Emerson Fittipaldi

When Rindt was killed in practice at Monza in 1970, Chapman called upon a young Brazilian to step up. Emerson Fittipaldi’s astonishing maiden F1 win at Watkins Glen that autumn helped ensure Rindt was crowned F1’s only posthumous champion.

Here too was a driver who grew close to Chapman. In 1972, Fittipaldi became F1’s then-youngest champion in a black-and-gold John Player Special Lotus 72, but left at the end of the following season having lost faith in Chapman for failing to call promised team orders on Ronnie Peterson at Monza, as Jackie Stewart became champion for a third time. Now, Fittipaldi focuses on the better days.

“When the car wasn’t very good, Colin had perception and intuition,” reckons the two-time world champion. “He’d say, ‘Emerson, tonight we’ll have dinner together’. Then I’d describe every corner. He’d put the two fingers here [to his temple] and he’d say, ‘I know what to do the next day to go much faster’. That was Colin. Today they have analytics. But Colin was a human analytic. It was incredible. He was my mentor.”

Andretti came closest to matching Chapman’s relationship with Clark

Photo by: Sutton Images

While the Lotus 25 introduced the first full monocoque design to F1, and the 49 the Ford Cosworth DFV as a fully stressed member, the wedge-shaped Type 72 stands as (probably) the archetypal Lotus F1 car – among the greatest from any constructor from any era. But the fact that it raced and won races over five seasons is a tell-tale of Team Lotus’s mid-1970s travails.

Chapman was distracted – by boats, by increasingly troubled road car production – and for a time the black-and-gold cars lost their way. The supposed successor, the Type 76, bristled with innovation – and didn’t work.

But as Team Lotus sunk to an uncharacteristic low, Chapman rallied: in the summer of 1975 he compiled a 27-page concept document specifying his requirements to redefine F1 design, setting out parameters but also questions he didn’t know the answer to – and gave it to Tony Rudd. The BRM veteran had switched in 1969 to the old enemy and was now in charge of a new R&D group that would essentially kickstart modern-era F1.

The following year, Andretti and Chapman finally consummated what they’d begun back in 1968. Mario had become an F1 winner with Ferrari in 1971, but later committed to the audacious US bid, run by Parnelli Jones, to conquer GP racing. Now that project had run out of puff. Broadcaster Chris Economaki had broken the news to him on the Long Beach grid that Vel’s Parnelli was pulling the plug on its F1 team.

“The next morning, I’m having breakfast at the Queensway Hilton Hotel all by myself, and Colin is all by himself a few tables away,” reflects Andretti. “I’m looking at him, he’s looking at me. So we started chatting.

“He said, ‘Mario, I wish I could offer you a decent car. You know, our car is not good. We’ve had the worst weekend.’ I said, ‘Colin, if you’ll have me on your team, we’ll make it better. But I need to be number one, because there’s only one best engine, one best shot, one best engineer.’ And that was the deal, on a handshake. 

Clark’s Lotus 25 at the 1962 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort

Photo by: Sutton Images

“I also said, ‘Colin, you’re having some distractions in your life: you got a car company, a boat company. You have to delegate those responsibilities. You have to come back full-time to F1.’ Some weeks later, I came across Hazel, and she said, ‘Mario, that’s the best thing you could have done, because I’ve been telling him that’.”

Designer Tony Southgate was there too as the team settled into its grand new Norfolk home at Ketteringham Hall. The veteran of Lola, Eagle and Shadow had been an F1 race-winning designer at BRM but was simply an engineer at Lotus on a short contract, working with Gunnar Nilsson while Chapman worked directly with Andretti. Southgate didn’t stay long – about 15 months – which was just fine by him.

Like most of his contemporaries, he idolised Chapman – and still did after one of the most intense and yet also fun periods of his working life. “Chapman to me was the pinnacle, the one you looked up to – there was nobody else within a mile,” declares Southgate. “And he remained so, as far as I was concerned, right up until he died.

“His secretary came in with a segmented orange on a laurel wreath plate and a cup of coffee. I looked at it and laughed” Tony Southgate

“For me, he was the ultimate British race car designer and I was curious to work with him, but he was totally different to me. He was basically an expert on any subject, or thought he was! Including finance, which he didn’t quite get right… A fascinating character.

“We used to have these engineering meetings after every race. Peter Warr, the team manager, who was a total nutcase just like Colin. Mad, but funny mad. Everything to extremes. From these meetings you’d expect at least 65 items on the work list, all written by hand.

“Colin had great taste and everything at Ketteringham Hall was beautifully done. There was this big sitting room with a massive dining table. His secretary came in with a segmented orange on a laurel wreath plate and a cup of coffee. I looked at it and laughed: bloody hell, you’ve come a long way since the 750MC!”

Chapman helps push 1967 Dutch Grand Prix winner Clark’s Lotus 49

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch / Getty Images

The Type 77 steadied the ship in 1976, but the labours of Rudd’s R&D group soon began to bear fruit. Peter Wright had initially joined Lotus at the behest of Rudd, his former boss at BRM, to head up Lotus’s composites research company.

F1 work was strictly for evenings and weekends. Wright had experimented with a ‘wing car’ concept way back at the end of the 1960s at BRM, and now found the support he needed to pursue the theory to an ultimately game-changing outcome via the Lotus 78 and, emphatically, the ‘Black Beauty’ 79.

Often described as the father of ground-effect aerodynamics, Wright gives full credit to Chapman for Team Lotus’s 1978 domination. “Although I came up with a number of things, innovations that Lotus followed successfully or unsuccessfully, they were always thanks to Colin,” he states.

“Without him they wouldn’t have happened. He had an instinct for technology, what was worth pursuing and what wasn’t. And when he thought it was worth pursuing he’d throw the whole bloody company behind it. He deserves the credit.”

In 1978, Andretti and a returning Peterson completed the Lotus resurrection with eight victories – six to the American – and four 1-2s, even if Peterson’s death the day after the Italian GP proved a devastating coda.

Characteristically, Chapman then kept pushing at those barriers and, while the opposition caught on and perfected ground effect, the Lotus 80 – designed to be the ultimate ‘wing car’ – porpoised its way to infamy.

Launch of the Lotus 72 at Hethel in April 1970

Photo by: Sutton Images

Into the 1980s, Team Lotus faltered as Chapman juggled his creaking wider empire, but pure F1 innovation still drove him on. Until 1981, when the complex twin-chassis Lotus 88 was banned.

“It was a good solution but was never going to be allowed in the middle of the FISA/FOCA war,” insists Wright. “But we had a plan B: active suspension. Colin was just starting to recognise computers were important, but he wasn’t interested himself.

“I went to his office and made a bid to do active suspension. I can’t remember what I told him it would cost – £15-20,000 or something – but 20 minutes later he said, ‘Right, I’ll get you a car’, which was a Turbo Esprit. ‘Build a prototype in six months.’

“She got Team Lotus back to winning grands prix, which is pretty cool. She was the one who took the decision to carry it on and she was at the sharp end for the financial risk” Clive Chapman

“That was where he was just wonderful to work for. We made a car in six months, developed it, took Colin and Elio de Angelis to drive it at Snetterton and he said ‘Right, you have another six months to produce an F1 car.’ What a person to work for. The reason he went motor racing was to try new things.”

Chapman’s death from a heart attack at just 54 was a seismic blow to F1 comparable to that of losing Clark. But Team Lotus pushed on in his spirit thanks, says Clive Chapman, to Hazel: “When Dad died she had to let the car company go, but she decided to keep running the F1 team, with Peter Warr playing a vital role.

“She got Team Lotus back to winning grands prix, which is pretty cool. She was the one who took the decision to carry it on and she was at the sharp end for the financial risk.”

Chapman flanked by Andretti and Peterson during testing of the Lotus 79 at Paul Ricard in December 1977

Photo by: Sutton Images

In 1987, Ayrton Senna scored Team Lotus’s final GP victories at Monaco and Detroit in a 99T fitted with Wright’s active suspension – another landmark.

So what would Chapman think of F1 today? Would it still fire him as it did through the free-wheeling 1960s and 1970s? The late John Hogan, Marlboro’s money man, once told this writer: “He’d be in it up to his neck. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right!’” Andretti agrees: “If Colin was here today, he’d be right at the top. He always had a way of thinking outside the box, sometimes at a fault to some degree.”

“He’d be amazed by how much money is involved – and would still be fuming at how much Bernie [Ecclestone] has made,” says Clive Chapman. “But he’d love the technology. He’d hate the regulations and restrictions obviously, but he would see F1 teams are still attracting the cleverest people to work harder than anybody else, to effectively get around the rules and win.”

Southgate and Wright are not so sure. “He hated straightforward, conventional cars,” says Southgate. “I remember him looking at a McLaren in the pitlane and he couldn’t understand why it was going quick because it was so simple-looking. It didn’t have any tricky suspension or weird aero. He turned to me and said, ‘You know, if I had to design a car like that I’d retire.’”

Wright: “When the 88 was banned Colin said, ‘I’m fed up with motor racing, I’ve got to go on because I have a contract with John Player’s but I’m not interested, I’m going to go and do aeroplanes. If I’m not allowed to innovate what’s the point of grand prix racing?’ I don’t think he’d enjoy motor racing now because when was the last innovation?

“One of the greatest things he did in the Type 79 was putting the fuel tank in the middle of the car. It has stayed there ever since and is a major safety feature. An awful lot of things about how grand prix cars were, certainly up until the 1980s, was Colin Chapman.”

Last word to Andretti, who retains affection and gratitude for what the Old Man did for him: “Going back to work with Colin, there was always something good to look forward to. One thing I loved was the energy he put in, the effort, and the emotion he would show when you won a race. I’m making this man happy. I love that. It was a dream time to be part of that team, it really was.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the Summer 2025 issue and subscribe today.

Full line-up of Lotus F1 cars assembled in 2010 for special photo op with Hazel Chapman

Photo by: Classic Team Lotus