- Colin Chapman: Inside the Innovator
“Simplicate and add lightness.” Contrary to the collective memory of enthusiasts, Colin Chapman, founder of Britain’s Lotus racing and sports car empire, did not coin this pithy phrase. But he embraced it like no other. With few exceptions, the Formula racing and roadgoing cars that bore the Lotus emblem during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were designed to be as simple and light as possible—and thus as nimble as possible. It was often a winning strategy: lightness brought Lotus numerous wins and more than a few Constructors’ and Drivers’ Championships over the years. Unfortunately, it often contributed to premature component failure as well, and thus to disappointing DNFs (“did-not-finishes”) and friction between Chapman and his drivers. In Colin Chapman: Inside the Innovator, Karl Ludvigsen explores “simplication,” lightness, and other core tenets of Chapman’s approach to race-car engineering. Through twelve lavishly illustrated, thematically [End Page 216] organized chapters, Ludvigsen examines four of Chapman’s guiding mantras.
The first was an obsession with economy. Unlike other prominent teams, Lotus did not have the budget to build all of its components in-house. Instead, it made do with off-the-shelf items—engines from Ford and Coventry Climax, transmissions from ZF, and, in roadgoing Lotuses, windshields and bumpers from production British Fords. This enabled Lotus to field its cars more economically, and it also freed Chapman to focus on his strengths, particularly suspension and chassis structure.
The second was a willingness to learn from other disciplines. Chapman, who trained as a structural engineer at University College London and flew for the Royal Air Force, avidly followed trends in aeronautics and structural design, from which “he cherry-picked advances in designs, materials and applications that he could use in his designs” for racing Lotuses (p. 386). Fruitful though this often was, it was closely related to the third, much-less-productive Chapman trait, an almost pathological inability to see a new idea through to maturity. He would pick up a new idea here or there, use it to reconceptualize a major component of his cars, and then immediately start working on the next major reconceptualization without ever fully developing and refining the previous iteration.
The fourth of Chapman’s axioms was the aforementioned obsession with “simplication” and lightness. Chapman never really “added lightness”; that was what hot rodders did, for example, when they drilled holes in the heavy passenger-car frames of their dragsters to remove excess weight. Instead, Chapman’s philosophy emphasized “designing for lightness and [then] strengthening when and where failures occurred” (p. 383). Wherever possible, Chapman would combine several functions into single components: inboard brake calipers also served as suspension-arm mounts, while half-shafts that transmitted power to the wheels also served as suspension members. This was “simplication.” Designing for lightness entailed the use of paper-thin space-frames, one-piece composite tubs, and distinctive magnesium wheels. But Lotus rarely had the money to conduct extensive trials, so the lightness-related failures that inevitably resulted typically showed up during actual races. This was not exactly confidence-inspiring for Lotus drivers. Neither was Chapman’s insistence that cars should run with an absolute minimum of fuel, since every imperial gallon of gasoline weighs in at 7.39 pounds. As a result, Lotuses posted fuel-related DNFs on more than one occasion. But for Chapman, the risk of running out of gasoline was acceptable. Carrying around an extra 15–20 pounds of fuel, on the grounds that it might be needed, was not.
When it came to design, Chapman was never exactly a team player. Neither was he a lone genius. Instead, his life and work embodied a bit of both, and Ludvigsen has done a masterful job reconciling the two, shedding light on the nature of Chapman’s inventive thought and how he transformed [End Page 217] his ideas into reality, whether they led to a checkered flag or an ignoble DNF. Colin Chapman is primarily an enthusiast’s book, but serious students of the history of technology...