Was short-lived Lotus 76 simply a lame duck or never given a fair crack of the whip?

The 76 is the forgotten Lotus. A car that nestles somewhere between two greats in the pantheon of Team Lotus Formula 1 machinery, the ground-breaking types 72 and 78, doesn’t have a chance of a look-in.

Yet if it gets a rum deal in the history books, it was probably also given one by the team over the course of 1974. A chassis that was meant to be a 72 for the modern age was dropped from frontline duty in the middle of the season and quietly forgotten at its end with nothing better than a fourth-placed finish to its name. Lotus opted not to persevere with what was in effect an updated 72, rather the old girl herself. 

Lotus drivers Ronnie Peterson and Jacky Ickx would continue throughout 1975 with the car that had come on stream in 1970. Yet Team Lotus had long since realised that the original John Player Special was no longer quite as special as it had once been.

Team boss Colin Chapman had decided in the middle of 1973 that it needed replacing with another Cosworth-engined machine. He turned to Ralph Bellamy, whose remit was to design a “tidied-up 72”.

“The requirement for what turned out to be the 76 was to make a car just like the 72, but better engineered and more reliable,” recalls ex-McLaren and Brabham man Bellamy, who’d joined the team in November 1972. “And that’s what the car was.”

Type 76 retained the torsion bar suspension and inboard brakes of its forebear, but it was stiffer, cheaper to make and easier to work on. The 72 was built around one of the last hand-rolled aluminium monocoques, whereas its successor utilised folded aluminium sheets.

“The 72, like the M19 I worked on at McLaren, were among the last of the rolled-skin F1 cars,” explains Bellamy. “They were handcrafted, which really compromised their construction.”

JPS/10, as it was designated, features the 76’s original – and short-lived – aerodynamic configuration with biplane rear wing

Photo by: JEP

The cooling system, at least in original form, was a departure: it helped facilitate a stiffer tub and a more serviceable racing car.

“The monocoque on the 72 was tucked in a bit at the back because the radiators stood out at right angles,” says Bellamy. “I decided I’d lay them back besides the engine. That meant we could have quite a wide monocoque at the rear – being a bigger monocoque it was stiffer.” 

In turn, a wider monocoque at the rear allowed a neater fuel tank arrangement: on the 72 the bag tanks stretched forward of the dash bulkhead, which meant creating cut-outs for the front torsion bars that ran along the chassis. Suspension tweaks on the 72 were the bugbear of Team Lotus mechanics as a result. “Stuff like that was a nightmare on the 72,” explains Bellamy. “It wasn’t practical.”

“That bi-plane arrangement was just something I thought might work. But you have to remember that we weren’t all that flash at aerodynamics in those days” Ralph Bellamy

Yet as simple as the 76 was, a car that built on the strengths of what had gone before, it is largely remembered for two innovations, even if they were quickly discarded. The most obvious, as can be seen in the photographs of chassis #2, or JPS/10 as it was properly called, in its original aerodynamic configuration was the biplane rear wing.

“It lasted for the press launch; that was about it,” is how Bellamy remembers it. In fact, the novel rear aero treatment appeared on the car at two events before being replaced by a conventional wing straight off the 72.

“That bi-plane arrangement was just something I thought might work, and it looked like it might,” explains Bellamy. “But you have to remember that we weren’t all that flash at aerodynamics in those days.” 

V-shaped brake pedal allied to a semi-automatic clutch didn’t last

Photo by: JEP

Included in Chapman’s design brief for the 76 was a semi-automatic clutch system that would allow its drivers to left-foot brake, something trialled on the 72 back in 1973. A button atop the gear lever triggered a starter motor: it ran in reverse to drive a hydraulic accumulator and activate the clutch. That allowed the driver to apply the brakes with his left foot if he so chose: the pedal was a v-shaped affair either side of the steering column. Again, it didn’t last long. 

There was another left-field development on the 76, one that came straight from Chapman’s inventive mind. The design of the nose was inspired by his work on boats through JCL Marine, a so-called ACBC company (after his initials) and maker of the Moonraker and Marauder motor yachts. 

“Colin gave me a lot of freedom in the design, but the nose was his contribution,” says Bellamy. “If you look at the early photos, the nose doesn’t appear to fit the rest of the car. He had this idea that came from boats, which he was very much into at the time. He called it the ventilated step. He thought that if it worked on the underside of a boat, it would work on the top of a racing car. That was Colin.”

The trick nose and rear wing, as well as the electric clutch developed by Automotive Products, all disappeared in short order after the car made its debut at the third race of the 1974 season, the South African Grand Prix. The novel gearchange was more or less abandoned during the course of that Kyalami weekend in March. It proved troublesome from the get-go, though Peterson persevered with it through practice and qualifying.

The biggest issue, remembers Bellamy, was that it was conceived with no in-built bleed system. “Any hydraulic system needs to be bled and when we built a car up the system would be full of air, so the clutch wouldn’t work properly,” he explains.

“The more you drove the car, the system kind of self-bled itself and eventually it would be half working. But remember in those days we were changing a Cossie every 600 miles or whatever. So the air would get in again and we’d never do any proper testing with it.”

The 76 (right) made its debut at round three of the season at Kyalami in South Africa

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Peterson could only qualify 16th, Ickx managing 10th. Worse was to come when the two Lotus drivers contrived to collide at the first corner on the opening lap, Peterson retiring as a result after two laps, Ickx going out with brake issues after 31. It was an inauspicious debut for the new car. Yet it was the events of its second world championship outing at Jarama in Spain two weeks later that did for the 76. 

The unusual rear aero set-up, used in South Africa and again when a single car was entered for Peterson at the non-championship International Trophy at Silverstone a week later, had gone, and so too had the semi-auto gearchange. Peterson qualified on the front row at the Madrid venue and led the opening exchanges of a race that started in wet conditions, just as he had done at Silverstone, also from second on the grid in the dry.

“He said, ‘Give me that’, and he put the tank tape around the oil rads. Off they go, the track dries and, lo and behold, both cars experience overheating” Ralph Bellamy

But it was the rain, or rather Chapman’s reaction to it, that hit the reputation of the Lotus 76. After the reconnaissance laps, Chapman spotted that the oil temperatures were low on the two Lotuses. The reason, explains Bellamy, was that the oil coolers (hung out the back as per the 72) were being doused in rain water by the rear tyres, but his boss insisted that tape needed to be applied to the coolers to bring up the temps. In fact, he did it himself.

“The mechanics always took some tank tape up onto the grid,” recalls Bellamy. “He said, ‘Give me that’, and he put the tank tape around the oil rads. Off they go, the track dries and, lo and behold, both cars experience overheating.”

Peterson would retire when his Cosworth DFV expired, two and a half laps after a chaotic tyre change for slicks had dropped him down the order. Ickx, who’d been running fourth from fifth on the grid before the pitstops, also encountered overheating problems, though he’d go out with braking issues again. 

Peterson’s 76 proves a bit of a handful before its retirement from the Belgian Grand Prix

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After one more race, the Belgian GP at Nivelles in May, Lotus team manager Peter Warr announced that it would be reverting to the 72 for the Monaco GP in May, though a 76 was present as a spare and used in practice by Ickx.

“Before Monaco, Peter Warr said, ‘These cars are no good, we are going to take the 72 to Monte Carlo’ and told me that I had to redesign the cooling system,” says Bellamy. “One of the criticisms of the car was that it overheated, and that was down to Colin and the tape.”

A cooling issue, perceived or otherwise, was only one of the crosses on which the 76 was crucified: its weight and a tendency to understeer were the others. Part of Chapman’s design brief was a reduction in weight from the old car to the new of 100lb (45kg).

Geoff Aldridge, who drew the 76 under Bellamy’s direction, reckons that was typical Chapman: “It was the Old Man’s way of giving people targets even if they could never hit them.”

Bellamy insists that the 76 wasn’t overweight. “It was deemed to be heavier, which it was with the electric clutch on it, but it wasn’t heavier per se,” he explains. “When [engineer] Nigel Bennett came to join us the following year, a 76 was sitting there in one of the bays. He asked what was wrong with the car. I told him, ‘Oh mate, don’t go there.’ He got the boys to roll the car onto the scales, and it was no heavier than a 72.”

Bellamy doesn’t disagree that the 76 understeered, but he points out that so did the 72. Lotus had claimed the drivers’ titles in 1970 and 1972 with Jochen Rindt and Emerson Fittipaldi respectively on Firestone tyres, but with a switch to Goodyears for 1973 it had gradually dropped down the development pecking order, constructors’ title that year or no.

Bellamy (left) was tasked by Chapman to build a “tidied-up 72”

Photo by: David Phipps / Sutton Images via Getty Images

The new car’s late arrival in mid-February after the first two grands prix and the defection of Fittipaldi to McLaren only hastened the problem – and the Team Lotus slide.

“Goodyear did much of their winter testing with McLaren and Emerson, and came up with a tyre that suited the M23,” explains Bellamy. “It was a more robust tyre. That didn’t work for Lotus with the inboard front brakes and low unsprung weight. We couldn’t get any heat into the tyres because we didn’t have the brake disc inside the wheel.”

A trio of wins for Peterson with the 72 over the course of 1974 would suggest that the decision to change tack was the correct one. But Bellamy argues that the old car was no better – “no worse” are actually the words he uses – than the new. Peterson won first time out at Monaco after the decision to go back to the previous car, a victory Bellamy puts down to SuperSwede’s mercurial talents: “That was just sheer driving skill, and being a slow track, he could hurl the car around and overcome the front tyre issue.”

“He said that was the best it had ever been. I seem to remember him saying it felt much better, but he ended up going slower” Ian Dawson

Peterson loved the 72, or at least his ideal of what the car should be. As Team Lotus laboured through the following year with the car, eventually in what was known as F-spec, he asked during testing at Paul Ricard for it to be put back to the configuration in which he had raced it to four grand prix victories in 1973.

“He said that was the best it had ever been,” remembers Lotus mechanic Ian Dawson. “I seem to remember him saying it felt much better, but he ended up going slower.”

Peterson’s passion for the 72 was matched by Warr’s love for Peterson. The bond he formed with his new driver in 1973 has to be implicated in Fittipaldi’s departure to McLaren for 1974. If Peterson was lobbying for the return of his baby, he would certainly have got the support of the team manager. 

Rain in Spain, and Chapman’s use of tank tape, set the downward spiral for the 76

Photo by: David Phipps / Sutton Images via Getty Images

Warr took against the 76, perhaps with Peterson whispering in his ear or perhaps because he resented Bellamy. The designer of the 76 claims Warr was against the car from the start: “He didn’t want to have anything to do with the 76. Until I arrived the only pathway to Colin was through him; that changed when I got there because Colin and I got on well.”

Aldridge backs up the idea that it was the victim of intra-team politics: “I think the car was never really in favour. I suspect it probably wasn’t given a fair chance.”

Warr didn’t go into detail about the 76 in his autobiography, Team Lotus: My view from the pit wall, published two years after his death in 2010. Instead he reserved more space for a not entirely complimentary commentary on Bellamy’s talents.

A man who once said that Nigel Mansell would never win a grand prix “so long as I have a hole in my arse” during the Brit’s stint at Team Lotus was in private equally blunt in his assessment of Bellamy’s talents. “The only thing he can draw is his salary,” he told one Lotus employee. 

The career of the 76 didn’t end with Peterson’s summer victories aboard the 72, first at Monaco in May and then at the French GP at Dijon in July. A car was present as a spare up until the Nurburgring in August.

It had to be pressed into service after Peterson shunted his 72 in practice on the Nordschleife, the rear end of his crashed car grafted onto the 76, now with a blunter nose and the longer sidepods of the revised cooling system. With this bitza machine Peterson notched up the best result for the 76: a fourth position for JPS/10, over a minute behind race winner Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari.  

Lotus 76’s folded aluminium construction was an update on hand-rolled 72

Photo by: JEP

After some decent summer testing, Lotus took two 76s to Monza in September, and a 72 as the spare this time. Peterson, however, decided to go back to his much-loved mount after practice. On the eve of the race, he opted to ditch the wide-track rear suspension that had come on stream in France and went on to take his third victory of the season.

Ickx would race JPS/10 in the same half-and-half form in Austria and Italy, before Tim Schenken drove the other car at Watkins Glen as a third Team Lotus entry at the season-closing United States Grand Prix in October.

And that was that for the 76. But its legacy stretched on. In the summer of 1975, Chapman, stung by his team’s fading fortunes, decided it was time to rethink the modern F1 car. He came back from a break at his villa in Ibiza with a document handwritten on one of his favoured Oxford feint-ruled notepads outlining the questions that needed to be asked.

The 76 was in no way the father of the 78, but it helped set the wheels in motion for the next Lotus breakout innovation that Chapman was forever seeking

The catalyst for the document appears to have been what had quickly turned into a working lunch with Bellamy, whose family had a property nearby in Ibiza. It led to the establishment of a think-tank at Ketteringham Hall, still a year away from becoming Team Lotus HQ, with Bellamy joined by ex-BRM men Peter Wright and Tony Rudd, who were recruited from elsewhere in the Chapman empire.

The result was the ground-effect aerodynamics with which Lotus would return to the forefront of grand prix racing with the type 78 and then the title-winning 79.

The 76 was in no way the father of the 78, but it helped set the wheels in motion for the next Lotus breakout innovation that Chapman was forever seeking. That makes it an important staging post in the history of the team.

Had Lotus successfully replaced the 72, would Chapman’s frustrations have manifested themselves in that document in his ultra-neat hand? That is a question that can never be answered. There’s also another one in the same category. Just how good, or bad, was the Lotus 76?

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Team fell back on the 76 spare car, with a 72 rear end grafted on, for Peterson at the Nurburgring

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