The pioneering F1 car that preceded Lotus’s terminal decline

It would be unfair to call the 99T the car that killed Team Lotus, but the circumstances surrounding its conception would hasten the end of a company which was already struggling to live up to its
hallowed reputation.

The 99T’s predecessors, the 97T of 1985 and 98T of 1986, overseen by technical director Gerard Ducarouge, had been competitive enough to win races but insufficiently reliable to build a championship challenge. Engines and gearboxes had been unreliable and the swap from Pirelli to Goodyear tyres hadn’t delivered all the performance gains anticipated. Star driver Ayrton Senna was beginning to chafe.

Renault had solved one problem and created another by withdrawing from Formula 1, first as a team at the end of 1985 and then as an engine supplier at the close of ’86. Lotus now needed a new engine supplier and, having witnessed first-hand the seemingly ever-improving thrust and durability of Honda’s turbocharged V6, Senna wanted nothing else. He made it clear to team manager Peter Warr that if this could not be arranged, he would walk – and there were plenty of other teams as desperate for Senna’s services as Warr was to retain them.

By July 1986 Warr had reached an agreement with Honda in which he would receive engines one development step behind those in the Williams cars, and replace second-driver Johnny Dumfries with Honda’s preferred choice, Satoru Nakajima. This only went some way to placating Senna, who insisted on a higher development budget before signing the heads of agreement for a new contract.

Player’s tobacco, whose iconic black-and-gold John Player Special brand had, barring a brief hiatus, been associated with Lotus since the early 1970s, balked at increasing its input beyond $2.5m a season. Reluctantly Warr looked elsewhere and succeeded in whistling $7m a season for three years from RJ Reynolds, owner of the Camel brand. From 1987 onwards Lotus F1 cars would be yellow rather than black.

Senna responded by claiming Lotus had broken the heads of agreement (which named Player’s as title sponsor), so the two parties would have to reach a new one – in which he was paid more for his ‘trouble’, $5m over two years with an option on his side to leave after one. Thus a substantial chunk of the funds which should have been spent on the development Senna demanded went into his pocket instead.

Senna drove a hard bargain to drive the Lotus 99T, which hurt the development coffers

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch/Motorsport Images

Structurally and aerodynamically the 99T was very much an evolution of the 98T, the first Lotus to feature a full-carbon monocoque ‘tub’ that was moulded rather than assembled from separate elements bonded together. When the car first broke cover observers were surprised to note its somewhat bulky appearance, since one of the notable features of the previous year’s Williams-Honda FW11 had been a low-profile rear deck and engine cover, a consequence of the RA166E V6 having much flatter inlet plenums than its predecessor. Had Lotus missed a trick?

Yes and no. Lotus’s less sophisticated tooling facilities for carbonfibre, and the methodology of the moulding, limited the complexity of the shapes it could achieve. Plus the 99T was just over 6cm shorter in the wheelbase than the FW11, and nearly 13cm shorter than the new FW11B: Lotus had a long-standing aversion to long wheelbases which stretched back to the Chapman days, reckoning them agility-sapping.

Plus the 99T had to accommodate additional hardware in the form of a new active suspension system, baked in to the race car at Senna’s insistence after he tested it back-to-back with a passively suspended example. While these tests were naturally inconclusive in terms of measuring the 99T’s pace against rival cars, what they did suggest to Senna and the engineers was that it could be faster over a race distance by extracting more life and performance from its tyres.

Lotus’s system supposedly offered something in the region of 60 variables, making it tricky both to set up for optimal performance and to debug when something went wrong

The computer-controlled Lotus active suspension was far more complex than the one introduced by Williams later in the 1987 season, which was derived from a road car project developed by AP. Lotus’s system had its roots in F1, since the team had first evaluated hydraulic suspension with electronically controlled anti-roll bars in 1983, but in the interim it had been developed with road cars in mind by Lotus Engineering, a separate company within the Lotus Group.

While the Lotus set-up was fully active, in that it could manipulate the springing and damping to control hub motions, and prevent squatting and diving under acceleration and braking as well as maintaining a fixed ride height, Williams’ system was simply ‘semi-active’. All Williams wanted to do was maintain its car at a consistent height above the track surface, thereby keeping it at optimal aerodynamic efficiency. As Frank Dernie, the architect of the Williams system, said: “I didn’t give a damn about ride quality. The driver is paid to deal with bumps.”

Posterity might enshrine Lotus’s active suspension as a case of over-engineering but, in period, memories of the original ground-effect era were still fresh. The original Lotus system had been conceived as a potential cure for aerodynamic porpoising after fitting stiffer springs hadn’t worked. And the team had been labouring with tyres for several years previously; a fully active system offered the tantalising possibility of finding a more optimal balance of grip vs degradation than passively suspended rivals.

While this proved to be true, it wasn’t enough to offset some of the disadvantages. While it’s widely claimed the active hardware added 25kg to the car’s weight and cost 12bhp, team insiders have cast doubt on these figures. No acolyte of Chapman would have added that much mass to a racing car without good reason, and the power demand varied according to how hard the system was working.

Semi-active Williams was simpler and faster than the fully active Lotus

Photo by: Sutton Images

What became clear over the course of the season was that the passively suspended Williams FW11B was faster than the active 99T and the margin grew when Williams added its semi-active system at Monza. Simplicity was a virtue: there was less to go wrong, less to adjust on the Williams. Lotus’s system supposedly offered something in the region of 60 variables, making it tricky both to set up for optimal performance and to debug when something went wrong – as at the opening round of ’87 in Brazil when handling issues forced Senna into the pits after he had qualified with and ran among the frontrunners.

There was also the question of that intangible element of a racing car: feel. Active and semi-active cars transmit fewer sensations through the driver’s touch points, potentially robbing them of the ability to balance the nervy equilibrium of fragile rubber on asphalt. It doesn’t matter whether a car’s limits of grip are higher if the driver can’t feel where they are because there’s no communication.

As would later be the case when Nigel Mansell and Riccardo Patrese drove semi-active Williams cars in 1992, one pilot thrived while the other floundered. If Senna was struggling with the 99T, there were few signs on the lap chart. For Nakajima, an F1 rookie, it was humiliating. While not out of the same drawer as Senna in terms of talent, he was a better driver than his results and times – often up to four seconds a lap slower then Senna in qualifying – would suggest.

Nevertheless Senna claimed the first grand prix victory for an actively suspended Formula 1 car. Though the win in Monaco owed something to fortune, in that Nigel Mansell was slowed by the effects of a broken exhaust while leading, Senna put himself in the position to inherit by qualifying second and running in that position until the crucial moment.

It was at the following race, on the bumpy parcours of the unloved Detroit street circuit, where the 99T decisively benefitted from the advanced technology under its skin. Mansell was on pole again but, after running away into the lead, began to suffer the debilitating effects of cramp. Senna, driving at a more measured pace and protecting his brakes, took full advantage of this and the 99T’s simpatico with its tyres, building an unassailable lead as he drove to the end without stopping while others broke for the pits to change tyres – either because they had to or, in the case of third-placed Alain Prost, because their teams thought they had to.

Senna would claim five more podiums that season to add to these victories and his second place at Imola – six if you count the second in Adelaide which was struck off when the scrutineers deemed his brake ducts too large. But the ability to run a race without stopping for tyres proved less beneficial than expected, except perhaps at Monza, but there Senna squandered the lead when he outbraked himself at the Parabolica while working through traffic with eight laps to go. At Jerez he looked to be channelling the spirit of the late Gilles Villeneuve’s 1981 victory on Spanish soil as he held off a conga line of cars for second, but his tyres gave up in the final laps.

Senna had already taken active technology's first win in Monaco, but it was Detroit where it's true benefits were felt

Photo by: Sutton Images

But for the DSQ in Australia, Senna would have finished second in the drivers’ championship. That, of course, would still have been no use for such a relentlessly competitive individual. By August Warr had learned – from Honda – that Senna was leaving for McLaren before Ayrton served notice. The reason Honda knew was that it, too, would be working with McLaren in 1988. Astutely, Warr took advantage of Williams’ reticence to have Nakajima and retained the Japanese driver for the following season – and cut a deal with Nelson Piquet, who became world champion at season’s end.

Piquet, though he brought the number one plate to Lotus and ensured continuity of Honda engine supply at Williams’ expense, wasn’t an equal or advantageous exchange for Senna. Having shunted his Williams into the wall at Imola’s daunting Tamburello corner the previous season, he’d lost 80% of his depth perception – not that he would admit that until years later – and was driving on instinct.

The ability to run a race without stopping for tyres proved less beneficial than expected, except perhaps at Monza, but there Senna squandered the lead when he outbraked himself at the Parabolica with eight laps to go

Also, Lotus’s next car would be hamstrung by internal politics. Having funded development of the active system and sent engineers at its own expense to races in 1987, Lotus Engineering now wanted to be paid to justify the cost on its own balance sheet. Warr refused – money was tight after so much Camel cash had gone to Senna and now to Piquet – and the 100T would be passively suspended.

Frustrated by Warr’s intransigence with the engineering team and dubious about Piquet’s recruitment, both Ducarouge and designer Martin Ogilvie made up their minds to leave and duly handed in their notices during the course of a 1988 season in which the neater-looking but no faster 100T claimed just three podium finishes in Piquet’s hands. Lotus would never win another grand prix, and its slide towards extinction had begun.

Race record

Starts: 32  
Wins: 2
Poles: 1  
Fastest laps: 3  
Podiums: 6  
Championship points: 64

Specification

Chassis: Carbonfibre monocoque
Suspension: Double wishbones with pullrod-actuated, computer-controlled hydraulic rams
Engine: Turbocharged Honda RA166E V6
Engine capacity: 1494cc  
Power: 1000bhp @ 11000 rpm
Gearbox: Six-speed manual 
Brakes: Carbon discs front and rear  
Tyres: Goodyear
Weight: 540kg 
Notable drivers: Ayrton Senna, Satoru Nakajima

Lotus 99T was the fabled team's last winning car before its downward descent began

Photo by: James Mann