The Lotus 88 is the most ingenious F1 car ever | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

And don’t think for a moment that F1 teams are above doing stuff solely and simply to mess with their rivals’ heads. I can remember Ross Brawn telling me that in 2009 when it was clear the Brawn BGP 001 had a clear performance advantage over the opposition, they’d put stuff on the car purely to gain the attention of the opposition who’d then spend valuable time figuring out what it was and how it worked when it didn’t work at all, not in any aerodynamic or mechanical sense at least. The only rule was it couldn’t make the car any slower or less reliable.

Of course the history of racing is littered by cars the opposition simply didn’t see coming from the Mercedes-Benz W165 – a 1.5-litre Grand Prix car conceived in total secrecy to circumvent a rule change designed to eliminate Mercedes on the grounds that it didn’t have a 1.5-litre Grand Prix car – to the Porsche 917, designed to circumvent rules intended to ensure that such a car could never be built.

But I think the smartest was the Lotus 88 even though it never actually raced. It was born from the sad fact that three years after Lotus and Mario Andretti eliminated the F1 field with the ground effect Lotus 79, Team Lotus had fallen off a cliff. It was a stunning fall from grace: having scored eight wins, seven fastest laps and no fewer than 12 pole positions in a 16 race season in 1978, in the next two seasons there were big fat zeros in all three columns. Something needed to be done, and the 88 was it.

The idea actually came from another unraced Lotus: the 86 testbed and the thinking behind it was actually quite simple. Aerodynamically the car needed to present as stable a body as possible to the airflow, one that didn’t roll, pitch or heave. Problem was the only way to achieve that conventionally was to fit ludicrous spring rates which meant the car became almost undriveable. Lotus tested springs of 2,500lb per square inch on the 80, at which point the performance became limited by the driver’s ability to keep his feet on the pedals. So Colin Chapman, with Martin Ogilvie and Peter Wright came up with another idea: a car with two chassis.

One, the ‘primary chassis’ would carry the body, sidepods and wings – all the aero surfaces in other words – and be sprung to move as little as possible, while the ‘secondary chassis’ carried the driver, engine and gearbox and was be sprung to provide optimum mechanical grip and, as a handy by-product, ride comfort that didn’t leave the driver feeling he’d done a few rounds with Larry Holmes.

Despite the concept being widely protested, the 86 was then developed into the 88 race car and was presented for scrutineering at the US Grand Prix West in 1981. Which it passed. It was then protested successfully by several other teams. Lotus appealed and won, and no further bars stood between the car and its first race. Except it broke even before qualifying could start. The same story – passed by the scrutineers, protested by the teams – kept it out of the Brazilian Grand Prix while in Argentina it never even got out of the scrutineering bay. Chapman tried once more on home territory for the British Grand Prix where it passed the technical inspection, then got thrown out by the protestors. And that was that.

The curious thing was that during what little running the 88 did, it never seemed to be that quick. But I expect its development potential was enormous, the other teams may have feared that Lotus was sandbagging and if the concept had worked, that would have been the end of the season before it began. But it still saddens me that such a clever, innovative car was never allowed to show its true potential.

It saddens me too that to this day people think it was McLaren that built the world’s first carbon-fibre F1 car. It wasn’t, merely the first to race. The Lotus 88 had a carbon tub and ran during a Grand Prix meeting months before the MP4/1 made its debut. And maybe that’s what the opposition feared most of all.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.