What would Colin Chapman (founder of Group Lotus and Team Lotus) have made of today, with the presentation of two Formula 1 teams both of which want to be called Lotus? Not that it matters much. People tend to glorify the departed and all too often gloss over some pretty glaring faults. If you read the Wikipedia entry for Chapman you will find all the good things about him – of which there were many in motor racing terms – but you will not find any mention of the word “DeLorean”.

This is strange given that in 1992 – 10 years after Chapman’s death – Lord Justice Murray at the Belfast Crown Court ruled that Chapman has perpetrated a “barefaced, outrageous and massive fraud” and would have been jailed for 10 years if he had still been alive. As it was, his sidekick Fred Bushell did go to jail. The Lotus car company had by then been sold off to General Motors and Team Lotus had been offloaded to employees Peters Collins and Wright for $6 million, which rather undermines the current argument that there was never any desire for the Team Lotus name to go on…

Anyway, I would not have thought of DeLorean today had it not been for the Lotus Renault GP press release which trumpeted the headline “Black to the Future”.



This reminded me of the Michael J Fox movie “Back to the Future”, on which the title was clearly based. The problem is that someone somewhere has forgotten that there was rather more to the movie than just a catchy name. Produced by Steven Spielberg, Back to the Future was a big hit when it came out in 1985. It had a clever plot about a teenager accidently going back in time and having to work out how to return to modern times. The movie made Fox really famous, but also resulted in the DeLorean DMC-12 shooting to global stardom as the car that Doctor Emmett Brown transformed into a time machine, powered by “a flux capacitor”. By then it was far too late to save the DeLorean Motor Company, which had gone bankrupt and was under investigation by the British Government.

It is a sorry tale for American entrepreneur John DeLorean had managed to get millions of taxpayers’ money to fund a factory in Northern Ireland to create jobs. He asked Lotus to help with design and the car was a flashy aluminium gull-wing device, which was little more than a revamped Lotus Esprit with a tweaked Renault V6 engine.

Another Lotus-Renault…



The DMC12 went into production at the end of 1980 and went bust in January 1982. The investigations which followed revealed that $17.5 million had disappeared into a Panama-based firm, ostensibly to pay Lotus. In fact this had been divided up between DeLorean, Chapman and Bushell. As the investigation was getting up speed Chapman died of a heart attack at the early age of 54.

It was a very odd idea for Lotus Renault GP to use such a headline, recalling the blackest days of the car company’s history at a moment when it is trying to portray itself as parked on the moral high ground, looking down on the usurpers of Team Lotus.

No doubt Chapman would have laughed his head off at the situation…