This week we head across the pond to England for Gearhead Guys You Should Know. Colin Chapman was the founder of Lotus Cars and without question one of the most brilliant car guys of the 20th century. As a testament to that, one model he designed has been reproduced in 90 different iterations by nearly as many replica companies.

After graduating from college and serving a brief stint in the RAF in the late ’40s, Chapman was working with a company called British Aluminum to design and sell aluminum as a good construction material. At night he’d toil in his shop on his race car. From those humble beginnings rose the most dominant race car builder for a 15-year stretch starting in the early ’60s and ending in the late ’70s. His cars would rack up seven Formula One titles, six Drivers’ Championships, and an Indy 500 win. They would also bring groundbreaking innovation and out of the box thinking to the forefront of racing, albeit with a price.

We’ll pick up his story in 1957 with the introduction of Lotus 7, a vehicle we’ve all seen photos of and perhaps seen on the street as it has been produced in replica form by over 90 different companies. The 7 is the physical embodiment of Chapman’s car building philosophy. It had a weakling 40hp motor when it was first introduced, but that shortcoming was more than made up for by the lack of weight. Every piece on the car was there for a reason with not a single nut or bolt extra. Chapman had a lifelong fetish for light weight.

This car was a huge hit with low-level sports car racers in England and sold like absolute hot cakes, affording Chapman to explore radical designs for full-on race cars. The 7 is still in production today, albeit in fully modernized form by Caterham.

Just a couple years past the introduction of the 7, Lotus made its debut in Formula One competition, a place where the British had wallowed in failure for, well, forever. A British car had never won a Grand Prix. That pain was erased when Stirling Moss won the Grand Prix of Monaco in 1960 behind the wheel of a rear-engined Lotus. He was no longer just a famous engineer. He was now a national hero.

Moss’s win was sweet, but Moss was not on the Lotus factory team. Lotus would earn the first team win at the USGP in 1961 with Innes Ireland driving the car.

The dominance reign of Lotus began in 1962 with the introduction of the Lotus 25. The car housed all of the ideas that Chapman had been working on increments over time. It was the forerunner of the modern open-wheel racer car with its comparatively small frontal area, first in F1 monocoque chassis, and inboard suspension pieces. It was an astonishing car for its time and a direct line can be drawn from it to today’s open-wheel racers.

Having had Scotsman Jim Clark driving lower-level cars as training for the big show since 1958, Chapman tapped him to shoe the F1 car full time in 1963. That decision would result in the pair winning seven of the ten Grand Prix races that season and walking off with the Drivers’ and Manufacturers championships. Clark would go on to be remembered as one of the greatest race car drivers of all time.

Also in 1963, Clark drove a Lotus at the Indy 500, finishing in second place as he could not get around race winner Parnelli Jones. Apparently Jones’s car was leaking oil all over the race track and Clark was doing everything he could to keep his own  car out of the wall.

The pair finished second in F1 points in 1964 and more bad luck prevented a better showing at Indy

Their year in the sun was 1965. Hall won another F1 championship and became the first driver to win the Indy 500 driving a Lotus 38, a rear engine car. It was the beginning of the end for front-engine cars at Indy and within a few short years, the whole field would be filled with rear-motor cars.

So what was Chapman’s secret? As we mentioned previously the man was obsessed with weight, and keeping it out of his cars. He was also an expert at finding loopholes in the rules and this allowed him to experiment heavily with aerodynamics, trying all manner of wings, ground effects, and the last major innovation before his death, a dual-chassis car. The driver sat in a lightly sprung chassis that was independent of the very stiff rolling chassis. This allowed the driver to be in relative comfort, not getting beat up, while the car was absolutely glued to the track. It tested incredibly well, but was banned before ever seeing action. Racers tend to get touchy about seeing something that will make their junk instantly obsolete. That was the case here.

It is interesting to note the two men who formed Cosworth–Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth–were employees of Chapman’s before striking out on their own. Their minds were also impactful in bringing Lotus to international prominence.

Chapman himself was a very talented racer but after a serious accident in 1956 he hung up his helmet to concentrate on the design and engineering side of the business.

The man was not without his detractors. Lotus cars were notoriously light on safety considerations for the driver. Stirling Moss once cut a cake with a picture of a Lotus race car on it and having experienced several wheels falling off at speed, cut the first piece with the wheel in it and asked that someone in the audience deliver it to Chapman.

In another famous story, Chapman removed a paper map from the wall of the shop, spray painted it with some kind of aluminized paint and proceeded to install it as the firewall of once race car. Race officials would not let the car run, but only after Chapman tried for hours to convince them that paper was not flammable.

Chapman died of a heat attack in 1982. Life was not going well for him. He had been involved with the DeLorean debacle and was apparently party to some illegal financial dealings. According to a judge at the time, if he were not dead he’d have been convicted and serving a long prison term.

The legacy of his name and his company live on, producing the lightest, most nimble sports cars in the world today. They are acquired tastes, lacking in every possible creature comfort, but they are the snug glove of automobiles. You don’t sit in the cars, you meld into them.

Colin Chapman’s legacy of national hero to potentially disgraced business man is a curious one. His genius would never have been recognized or appreciated to the level it was without Jim Hall behind the wheel. The pair was perfect together with Hall’s driving talent realizing the full potential of Chapman’s seemingly endless chain of ideas.

So there’s Colin Chapman in a nutshell, a gearhead guy you should know because every modern open-wheel race car is built and based on the principles introduced on the Lotus 25, some 45 years ago. Neat stuff to think about.