The Most Important Car in Formula 1 History? — Lotus 72
If someone were to ask you what the most important car in Formula 1 history was, what would you say?
Perhaps you’d suggest the Alfa Romeo 158 “Alfetta”, which dominated the very earliest years of the sport. Maybe the Cooper T51 which proved the viability of the mid-rear engine position which all F1 cars use to this day? Or possibly the Renault RS01 which introduced turbocharged engines to the sport and set Formula 1 on a path which eventually took engine power to unprecedented levels that even cars of today struggle to match.
All of these make credible arguments for a place as F1’s most significant piece of machinery. For me though, the answer is clear — the Lotus Type 72, introduced to Formula 1 in 1970.
Lotus is a company that is inextricably associated with innovation in F1. Such is the marque’s influence that I could quite easily have replaced all the examples of important cars I posited in this article’s opening with designs from Lotus’ workshops.
The Lotus 25 with its pioneering fully stressed monocoque, and the iconic Lotus 49 which popularised the concept of using the engine as a stressed member of the car’s chassis are two other designs from the Hethel-based firm which have strong claims as cars of importance.
For me though the Lotus 72 of 1970 stands out among even the pedigree roster of Lotus’ back catalogue. Its introduction represented a genuine paradigm shift in Formula 1 design on a scale that few other cars can claim to match, with some of the ideas it sought to make use of being so advanced and forward-thinking for the time that only more recently have they been successfully implemented.
Development of the 72 came at a mixed time for Lotus. On the one hand, the team was right in the thick of what would prove to be its most sustained period of competitiveness in the outfit’s history, with Lotus cars winning at least one race in every single Formula 1 season from 1960 to 1971 including three world drivers’ championships in 1963, 1965 and 1968.
On the other hand, the team and its founder were left reeling after the death in early 1968 of Jim Clark — Lotus’ star driver, close friend of its visionary founder Colin Chapman, and the man who had brought Chapman’s team its first two championships in dominant fashion in 1963 and ’65.
The car which Lotus were using in the period surrounding Clark’s death was the Lotus 49 mentioned previously, which was itself a revolutionary piece of machinery — being the first car to introduce the legendary Cosworth DFV 3 litre V8 engine to Formula 1, and also using that engine to form part of the car’s structure as opposed to using a separate frame at the back of the car.
Even on the commercial side of the sport, the Lotus 49 was a significant innovator, as it became the first non-privateer car to feature sponsorship, which came from Gold Leaf cigarettes.
After winning its debut race upon its introduction in 1967 in a season where only reliability stopped Lotus from claiming the championship, the 49 then took Graham Hill to the title in 1968 as Lotus gradually recovered from the death of Clark that same year.
In 1969 though, Lotus found themselves outstripped by the burgeoning Matra team with their MS80 chassis designed by Gerard Ducarouge and driven by future F1 legend Sir Jackie Stewart, who beat Lotus drivers Hill and new signing Jochen Rindt to the title.
Lotus, as with all true innovators, did not rest on their laurels, and turned towards radical designs to ensure their continued success and counter any potential challengers.
First came the Lotus 63, which looked to introduce 4-wheel drive to Formula 1 in order to make better use of the nearly 500 horsepower developed by the Cosworth DFV engine which had initially been developed specifically for Chapman’s squad.
The 63 was introduced part way through the 1969 season which had been dominated by Matra early on, with hopes of swinging the balance back towards Lotus.
Unfortunately for Chapman this wasn’t to be though, and the experimental 63 quickly proved to be a failure which the team’s drivers were reluctant to get behind the wheel of. Lotus had to face this harsh reality, and therefore largely stuck with the old 49 for that season.
It is perhaps the failure of the 63 and this resultant reversion to the trusty but no longer cutting-edge 49 which led to Lotus dropping to third in the constructors and winning only two races that year, despite the rapid Jochen Rindt taking five out of the 10 available pole positions.
Commendably though, the failure of the Type 63 did not deter Lotus from attempting outside-the-box ideas again, and it was at this point that the similarly radical Lotus 72 came into being.
By the 1960s, Formula 1 cars had generally all fallen into a fairly similar layout. Almost every car used the same cigar-shaped form factor, with the car’s main radiator mounted in the nose and the engine mounted at the rear, where it was used as a structural member of the chassis as had been popularised on the Lotus 49.
One slight disruption to this cigar-shaped template in the late 60s was the arrival of aerodynamic downforce in F1 for the first time. This initially came in the form of tall aerofoils mounted to the car’s suspension members, but after safety issues these were revised to smaller wings mounted rigidly to the car’s chassis at the front and rear.
These gave the cars of the late 1960s a slightly more varied look than previously, but they still largely all stuck to the same tubular design with the fundamental elements of the car in much the same layout.
The Lotus 72 completely did away with this philosophy in the most radical way possible. Firstly, it moved to an aerodynamic “wedge” shaped design. This had been trialled to some extent on the Lotus 63, which was also vaguely wedge-shaped.
On the 63 though the front mounted radiator still necessitated the retention of some of the cigar-profile seen on other contemporary cars. This was not so on the 72. Designers Maurice Philippe and Colin Chapman opted to move the car’s radiator away from the nose, and instead opted for two smaller radiators mounted in “sidepods” in between the car’s front and rear wheels.
To a modern Formula 1 fan such an arrangement seems nothing radical, and this is because this layout has gone on to become absolutely standard in the sport (to the point that cars which shy away from this format such as 2022’s “zeropod” Mercedes W13 are now seen as radical instead, though even that still used twin side mounted radiators).
For 1970 however this setup was absolutely revolutionary and proved to be a masterstroke. The more central placement of the radiators compared to a traditional nose-mounted arrangement gave the car better weight distribution which facilitated better handling.
Simultaneously the removal of the radiator from the nose allowed the front of the car to be completely aerodynamically shaped for better penetration through the air and therefore made the 72 capable of greater straight-line speeds.
The radical design features went beyond even this new layout though. Lotus had long been proponents of inboard brakes (where the brake discs are mounted inside the chassis and connected to the wheels using brake shafts) in order to reduce a car’s unsprung mass.
On the 72, Lotus took this approach to its logical extreme by making both the front and rear brakes inboard for the first time, where most other cars which used inboard brakes chose to only mount the rear discs in this fashion. This cut unsprung mass to an absolute minimum and further improved the new car’s handling characteristics.
The initial launch-spec 72 for the 1970 Spanish Grand Prix also included complex anti-dive front suspension and anti-squat rear suspension geometry.
The purpose of this was to create a more stable aerodynamic platform and thereby ensure that the downforce created by the car was consistent whether under acceleration or braking.
Anti-dive and anti-squat suspension geometries have gone on to become key talking points in even modern F1, and they are still talked about by many as though they are a hugely technologically advanced black art.
An example of this attitude towards “trick” suspension would be this year’s utterly dominant Red Bull RB19, whose anti-dive suspension has been touted as a key part of its competitiveness by many commentators, and has come in for continual praise as a genius piece of design work.
In the case of Lotus, they were already thinking about this technology in 1970 — though the creativity of the team’s designers perhaps outstripped the technology of the time. The suspension of the car at launch spec was found to be one of the few elements of the design that did not work well, with drivers complaining of a lack of “feel” in the car.
Perhaps as a result of such issues, the 72 did not follow in the Lotus 49’s footsteps of winning on debut.
In fact, it had a rather inauspicious start with lead driver Rindt qualifying only 8th at the Jarama circuit and subsequently retiring from the race with ignition failure, while second driver John Miles failed to even qualify in the somewhat byzantine qualifying rules of the time which saw a certain contingent of drivers get automatic places in the race regardless of what time they set in qualifying and only 16 cars being allowed to start at all.
Lotus therefore reverted to the trusty 49 for a couple of races while the 72 was fettled to perfection, with Rindt giving the old warhorse its last win after a brilliant drive on the streets of Monte Carlo.
At round 5 in the Netherlands, the 72 returned with the anti-dive and anti-squat suspension systems removed and immediately showed itself to be a world-beater following the adjustments.
Rindt took pole and led all but 2 laps as he charged to his second victory of the season. He would follow this up with another 3 wins in succession to lead the world championship by a whopping 20 points at a time when a victory gave only 9 points.
Even a double DNF at Rindt’s home race in Austria didn’t see his gap at the front of the championship reduced, as second placed Jack Brabham also failed to score.
Rindt seemed to be riding the crest of a wave, and looked certain to be champion by season’s end, but at Monza with four rounds to go, tragedy struck - and regrettably it was a tragedy that was partially related to the Lotus 72’s design.
Monza, as it is today, is a track where straight-line speed is absolutely crucial. This was even more true in 1970, as Monza did not feature the chicanes that it does today, making it almost entirely a full throttle blast.
It was therefore imperative that F1 cars produce as little drag as possible in order to be competitive, which presented a problem to Rindt in his Lotus 72 which was heavily optimised around its aerodynamics aimed at producing downforce but which also came with the penalty of some drag. Lotus therefore opted to remove the 72’s wings in order to minimize drag.
Several other teams did the same, but their cars were not as heavily designed around their aerodynamics as the Lotus, which became incredibly twitchy and difficult to handle with the wings removed according to Rindt’s teammate Miles.
It was in qualifying that the tragedy struck, as Rindt’s unstable Lotus speared off the circuit during qualifying after a front brake shaft failure, with the resultant crash sadly killing the Austrian, who had previously been vocal about safety issues with Lotus’ cars and the lack of trust that such fragile machinery could instill in a driver.
Such was the 72’s advantage in Rindt’s hands that even after his tragic passing, he still ended the 1970 season on the top of the standings as F1’s first and thankfully only posthumous world champion, despite the fact that there were still four races left in the season after his death.
His place in the Lotus team was taken by Emerson Fittipaldi, who managed to win in his first start in the 72 — thereby helping to secure Rindt’s championship by denying his rivals valuable points.
The Lotus 72’s case for being the single most important car in Formula 1 history does not just hinge on its technical excellence and its strong, if tragic, debut season though.
The 72 also possessed staggering longevity in F1, continuing to compete at the forefront of F1 for long enough that it remains to this day the most successful F1 chassis in the sport’s history, with 20 wins, two world drivers championships and three world constructors championships over its lifespan, which lasted from 1970 all the way to 1975.
This stands as a record which is unlikely to ever be broken in this modern era of F1 which sees teams develop a brand new car every season.
The 72’s second campaign in 1971 actually saw results take a significant step back as Lotus’ rivals caught up and the pall of Rindt’s death still hung over the team.
The result was that a Lotus car failed to win a championship grand prix for the first time in over a decade. Lotus persevered though and retained faith in the 72’s design, upgrading the car to “D” specification for the 1972 season.
That year also saw new sponsor John Player coming onboard to replace the previous Gold Leaf sponsorship which Lotus had run since 1968, resulting in the iconic “John Player Special” livery which Lotus would run on-and-off for the best part of a decade.
The primary adjustment on the D-spec 72 was new rear suspension, and the effect was immediate. Fittipaldi drove the 72D to five wins in twelve races, and comfortably secured his first and the 72's second world title over Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell, proving in the process that the 72 was still at the very forefront of Formula 1 car design and that 1971 had merely been a blip.
In 1973 Stewart would hit back to reclaim the driver’s title, but the combined efforts of Fittipaldi and new signing “Superswede” Ronnie Peterson were enough to snatch another constructors title, with the two drivers taking seven wins and ten poles between them — including a record-setting 9 pole positions in a season for the rapid Peterson.
It has been argued by many that only the lack of a clear “number 1” driver at Lotus stopped them from taking both titles that year, as Peterson and Fittipaldi took points off each other due to being so evenly matched.
After the 1973 campaign, Fittipaldi departed for McLaren, who were fielding a car called the M23 which was heavily inspired by Lotus’ by-then iconic 72.
Peterson was therefore promoted to lead driver, while former Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx, who had finished second to Rindt back in 1970, was signed to drive the second car.
Lotus had actually intended to replace the 72 after 1973, with the new Lotus 76 aiming to raise the bar for F1 cars in 1974 just at the team had done back in 1970.
The 76 featured its own set of innovations such as an electronic clutch for faster gearchanges in the days of fully manual gearboxes, as well as a somewhat ungainly double-plane rear wing, which were hoped to provide an edge over a competition that was becoming increasingly comfortable and confident with F1 aerodynamics.
It proved to be a complete flop however, somewhat recalling the Lotus 63 of five years prior which had similarly sought to move the needle for F1 car design with its outside-the-box thinking, but which had likewise failed spectacularly.
With Chapman and Lotus being forced to accept the 76’s failure, the team were thereby left with no choice but to bring the venerable 72 out of retirement. This went for not just for the remaining races in 1974, but also for 1975 too as they did not have any other design ready for that season.
1974 went surprisingly well given the design’s age, and would prove to be something of a swan song for the 72, though the car’s performance was clearly not what it once was.
Other cars which had taken onboard and iterated on Lotus’ innovations, such as the aforementioned McLaren M23 had begun to take the fore, but Peterson nonetheless drove fantastically to take another three wins in the trusty old 72.
The championship standings presented a rather less rosy picture though, as the Superswede could manage only 5th place in the championship in a campaign which was blighted by unreliability as the ageing design was pushed to its limits in search of more performance.
If 1974 had proven something of a pleasant surprise though, given the car was still able to win races, the last outing for the 72 in 1975 would sadly prove to be a thundering crash back to reality.
Both Peterson and teammate Ickx struggled immensely to drag the outdated machine to any results of note as the car now proved truly outclassed by more modern designs such as Ferrari’s new 312T and the McLaren M23.
A single podium for Ickx with second place at the Jarama circuit where the car had made its debut five years earlier was the best that either driver could manage, after which the car was finally put out to pasture.
It is testament to the Lotus 72’s significance though that at the start of it’s six-season Formula 1 career, not one car looked remotely like it or was even based on the same principles of its design.
By its well-deserved retirement though, the entire Formula 1 grid had shifted to using the template which had been set out by the vision of Maurice Philippe and Colin Chapman when they penned the wedge-shaped wonder.
That is the mark of a truly revolutionary design, and very few other Formula 1 cars can claim to have had such influence, with even fewer having had as much longevity.
It is a twist of delicious irony too that just when other teams felt they had finally got on top of and even outstripped the design principles that Lotus had pioneered with the 72, their understanding of F1 chassis design would be totally upended once again by another development from the mind of Chapman and his team.
This time it was Lotus’ deployment their revolutionary type 78 chassis at the beginning of 1977 which caused a similar quantum leap to what the 72 had triggered seven years earlier. That can be a story for another time though…
