Collectors & Aficionados
Colin Chapman and Lotus 1 - The beginning. Performance through light weight
The article discusses the history of Lotus, the British sports car manufacturer, and its founder Colin Chapman. It explores Chapman's passion for building cars and his focus on reducing weight as the key to improving performance.
If Colin Chapman started building cars out of passion, that passion must have been truly epic. Not so much because he built his first car when he was just twenty years old while studying Engineering at University College London, in order to compete in those curious but very popular races in England called Trials. Many others had done something similar before him. But because once het set himself to work, he immediately realized with his innate instinct as a “creator of all things new”, that if everyone did things in one way, he could do them in another.
He was an excellent engineering student so it was clear to him that weight was the enemy of performance. The year was 1948 and post-war motoring tended to fall on those old habits of the pursuit of power in order to win. The bigger and more powerful the engine, the more successful the cars would be. The best example of the time was Enzo Ferrari who dictated this law with his glorious 12-cylinder V-engines.
