Lotus's Colin Chapman: 'You see? It designs itself...'

No story on Colin Chapman could omit the word ‘innovation’. But his remarkable talent lay not so much in inventing devices as solving problems, and, more crucially, in identifying that problem first. What set him apart was his ability to look at the whole picture, ignoring the constraints of accepted knowledge while looking for a way to reduce weight, drag or complexity. If nothing existed to suit, he was too practical to set it aside and wait for technology to catch up; he would dismantle the problem and find answers to each of its constituent parts.

Often the latest clever idea became blindingly obvious — but it took Chapman to see it first. Hugh Haskell, a Lotus engineer in the Sixties, relates in his book Colin Chapman — Lotus Engineering how Chapman would guide a junior through the needs and constraints of the current problem until his pupil reached the key to it. Then he’d say “you see, it designs itself!” and walk away.

Although he took an engineering degree, his speciality was structural, not mechanical, engineering and this may well have helped his unusual ability to see the wide view. Structural engineering is yet more concerned than mechanical with economy of materials. A long-span beam, for example, has to cope with its own weight as well as applied loads. As you approach strength/span limits, the returns diminish: the thicker you make it, the less its strength increases. Generally this factor is less critical in automotive applications, but it is a crucial discipline for the structural engineer.

There are no long spans in a car, but Chapman’s perennial drive for fineness and lightness surely reflects this early indoctrination, and it is possible to surmise his ability to look laterally at problems also thrived in this field. Instead of focussing purely on designing a strong bridge, for example, the civil engineer might also consider a causeway. Chapman’s genius was that he could stand still further back and ask “do we need to cross the river at all?”

His first car, a trials special built in 1948 from an Austin Seven, addressed the notorious whippiness of the A7 chassis by using plywood side panels bonded to alloy sheet — extra rigidity for no extra weight, by stressing panels which would otherwise do no more than keep the wind out. At a time when the vintage idea of keeping the chassis flexible still existed, he identified that predictable handling required a stiff frame with pliant suspension.

By the time he began his Lotus MkII, Chapman had researched every A7 part and selected the best, collectively extracting more than anyone from more or less standard parts. The car proved a successful all-rounder in trials, sprints and rallies and, in 1950, brought Chapman his first track win. From then on racing became his focus, and he designed Lotus MkIII carefully around 750MC regulations. Not specifically ‘within’ those regulations: forced to retain the A7 chassis, he bolted tubular bracing to it — not the last twin chassis of his career. Similarly, he side-stepped the drawback of its siamesed intake ports by devising an inlet manifold with a divider which poked tongue-like into the port, effectively splitting it. His car ran rings around the opposition, and the inlet was banned the next year. Lateral thinking, clever solution from existing technology, regulations exploited but not broken, official disapproval — he was setting his pattern.

The MkIII’s achievements brought a couple of commissions to build cars, and allowed Chapman to work on his first chassis design. To finance a car for himself, he had to sell a run of this new MkVI, and again he stretched the rules, avoiding Purchase Tax by offering a kit for self-assembly. Though using off-the-shelf parts for cheapness, Chapman’s machine was a serious competition car featuring a triangulated tubular frame at a time when even Grand Prix cars had ladder chassis. It also had adjustable suspension, a key to his mastery of making optimum use of tyres.

The MkVI was the right car at the right time, and continuous demand, plus the race successes of its buyers, made Chapman a manufacturer. But it was racing which fired him, and allowed him to measure his achievements directly against others working under the same constraints. He loved to make parts redundant: using a fixed-length drive-shaft as the upper suspension link, putting fluids through chassis tubes, using a moulded tongue on the Elan bonnet to obviate hinges, and throwing away several feet of metal on the Lotus 49 by using the Cosworth DFV engine as the rear of the chassis and bolting the suspension to it.

Very early on he focussed on airflow, loving the fact that lowering drag is a something for nothing deal. With smooth bodies designed by Frank Costin, the VIII, IX and Eleven (Chapman now dropped the roman numerals) sportscars looked like nothing else, and offered 130mph on only 80bhp. There were no exotic elements: they kept the split-beam front suspension of the VI, had unsophisticated running-gear and no costly lightweight materials. Yet they were light, simply because Chapman had distributed the minimum material efficiently, into a rigid tubular frame. At this time he was the only designer to have shown a knowledge of pure three-dimensional structures, and it led to his being asked to take a look at the Vanwall Grand Prix car. His advice on a space-frame chassis, a de Dion axle, and employing Frank Costin to shape the body turned Vanwall into Formula One winners — before he had even built his first single-seater.

Not all his ideas worked. His sequential ‘queerbox’ closed up all the gears in the ‘box by removing the selectors from in between them, and engaged gears by pins projecting from the hollow shaft. To this day it remains a fine concept, but no-one has yet made it work effectively.

Equally, what seemed the brilliant stroke of using the antiroll bar to locate the Eleven’s wheel upright, and making a suspension arm redundant, brought adjustment difficulties, so for his first rear-engined design, the 18, Chapman adopted simple double wishbones. Slightly heavier, but easier to setup, and therefore a net improvement. He was not one to cling too long to a principle: if the perfect part was hard to manufacture or repair, and the advantage it offered small, he was quite happy to abandon it for something plainer if it meant an overall benefit.

This was the opposite position to BRM, who tended to pursue an idea beyond the sensible cutoff point, and spend thousands on the best possible quality even when it wasn’t making the car faster. But after seeing what this ‘new boy’ had done for Vanwall, BRM also asked his advice, and allowed Chapman to change entirely the car’s suspension, transforming its handling. It was all good PR for the arrival of the Lotus type 12, the Formula 2 car which, in 1956, began the long train of Lotus single-seaters.

Though Chapman did not immediately follow the Cooper rear-engined route, he quickly became the one the others followed. The pencil-slim 20’s cigarshape became the single-seater racing norm until 1968 when the radiatorless Lotus 56 Indianapolis turbine car introduced the wedge profile and shovel nose, trying to burrow under the airstream. The most admired of this series, the 72, is remembered for what Rindt, Peterson and Fittipaldi did with it, but Kenneth Sears, now Head of Technical Strategy and Research at Lotus, thinks its real importance was in its layout. It was, he says, the car which established the ‘architecture’ of all F1 cars from then till now. Side radiators, fuel behind the driver, a nose which has only aerodynamic functions; not a fashion, but a logical optimum which still applies.

Though racing had first priority, it had to be supported by a turnover of road cars, and while the VI and the following VII appealed to the hardened enthusiasts and many weekend racers, Chapman’s next concept took Lotus in a direction, which has continued ever since glass-fibre. He wanted to build a comfortable road car; but instead of investing in heavy presses, or being restricted by individual hand-building, he ignored the norms of the time, read everything written about the subject (always a Chapman feature) and simply struck out fearlessly on his own.