The Lotus 100T is a
Formula One
Formula One (also known as Formula 1 or F1) is the highest class of international racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The World Drivers' Championship, ...
car designed by
Gérard Ducarouge
Gérard Ducarouge (23 October 1941 – 19 February 2015) was a French Formula One car designer whose career in motorsport started in 1965 when he joined Equipe Matra Sports. His Matra MS80 car, entered by the privateer Matra International te ...
and
Martin Ogilvie Martin may refer to:
Places
* Martin City (disambiguation)
* Martin County (disambiguation)
* Martin Township (disambiguation)
Antarctica
* Martin Peninsula, Marie Byrd Land
* Port Martin, Adelie Land
* Point Martin, South Orkney Islands
Austral ...
for
Team Lotus
Team Lotus was the motorsport sister company of English sports car manufacturer Lotus Cars. The team ran cars in many motorsport categories including Formula One, Formula Two, Formula Ford, Formula Junior, IndyCar, and sports car racing. More ...
, and used during the
1988 Formula One season
The 1988 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 42nd season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 1988 Formula One World Championship for Drivers and the 1988 Formula One World Championship for Constructors, which were contested ...
. The 100T was an update of the previous
Lotus 99T
The Lotus 99T is a Formula One car designed by Gérard Ducarouge for use by Lotus in the 1987 Formula One World Championship.
Background and design
After Renault pulled out of F1 at the end of , Lotus signed a deal with Honda for use of th ...
model; technically the car was virtually unchanged, except for redesigned nose and rear bodywork. The car was powered by the same, , 1.5L
turbocharged
In an internal combustion engine, a turbocharger (often called a turbo) is a forced induction device that is powered by the flow of exhaust gases. It uses this energy to compress the intake gas, forcing more air into the engine in order to pro ...
Honda
is a Japanese public multinational conglomerate manufacturer of automobiles, motorcycles, and power equipment, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan.
Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, reaching a product ...
V6 engine
A V6 engine is a six-cylinder piston engine where the cylinders share a common crankshaft and are arranged in a V configuration.
The first V6 engines were designed and produced independently by Marmon Motor Car Company, Deutz Gasmotoren Fabrik ...
that powered the
McLaren
McLaren Racing Limited is a British motor racing team based at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, Surrey, England. McLaren is best known as a Formula One constructor, the second oldest active team, and the second most successful Formul ...
team to 15 wins in 16 races in 1988. The car was driven by reigning
World Champion
A world championship is generally an international competition open to elite competitors from around the world, representing their nations, and winning such an event will be considered the highest or near highest achievement in the sport, game, ...
Nelson Piquet
Nelson Piquet Souto Maior (, born 17 August 1952) is a Brazilian retired racing driver and businessman. Since his retirement, Piquet, a three-time World Champion, has been ranked among the greatest Formula One (F1) drivers in various motorspo ...
, and Japanese driver
Satoru Nakajima
is a Japanese former racing driver. He is a five-time Japanese Top Formula champion, and was the first full-time Japanese Formula One driver. Accordingly, he is responsible for several firsts for Japanese drivers in Formula One, including bei ...
.
History
Unlike its predecessor, the 100T wasn't fitted with electronic
active suspension An active suspension is a type of automotive suspension on a vehicle. It uses an onboard system to control the vertical movement of the vehicle's wheels relative to the chassis or vehicle body rather than the passive suspension provided by large sp ...
, still an advanced system despite having been introduced on the 99T at the insistence of lead driver
Ayrton Senna
Ayrton Senna da Silva (; 21 March 1960 – 1 May 1994) was a Brazilian racing driver who won the Formula One List of Formula One World Drivers' Champions, World Drivers' Championship in , , and . Senna is one of three Formula One drivers fro ...
who was looking for an advantage. Lotus felt that the weight of the system (approx 25kg or 55lb), along with the Honda having lost around from 1987's figures thanks to the FIA's lowering of the turbo boost limit from 4.0 bar to 2.5 bar, the further loss of approximately 5% of engine power to run the active system was not worth it and reverted to a conventional suspension setup with dampers supplied by Bilstein. However, with the loss of Senna to McLaren, and despite signing triple and reigning World Champion Nelson Piquet as his replacement, Lotus were very much an also-ran team during much of 1988. Piquet picked up a number of points, including three third-placed finishes, during the season, but the car's lack of ultimate speed resulted in Lotus's first season without a win or
pole position
In a motorsports race, the pole position is usually the best and "statistically the most advantageous" starting position on the track. The pole position is usually earned by the driver with the best qualifying times in the trials before the rac ...
since . Indeed, when Nakajima failed to qualify the car at
Monaco
Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (french: Principauté de Monaco; Ligurian: ; oc, Principat de Mónegue), is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Lig ...
, it became the first (and only) F1 car powered by a Honda turbo engine which failed to qualify for a race. Nakajima actually failed to qualify twice in 1988, also failing to make the grid in
Detroit
Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...
.
Many felt that with Honda power, Piquet should have been able to match the McLarens, or at least be the "best of the rest", though more often than not he wasn't even that, and at times was even shown up by his team mate Satoru Nakajima who many believed would not even have been in F1 had it not been for Honda. Piquet's lackluster season in defence of his championship confirmed the general view that the Brazilian would race to win in nothing less than a top notch car (though he confirmed in a 2012 interview on Brazilian TV that he was "never right" after his qualifying crash at the
1987 San Marino Grand Prix
The 1987 San Marino Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held on 3 May 1987 at the Autodromo Dino Ferrari, Imola. It was the second race of the 1987 Formula One season. It was the seventh San Marino Grand Prix and it was held over 59 laps of t ...
, and only drove from 1988 until his retirement after "for the money"). The 100T proved it was not a top notch car despite team boss
Peter Warr
Peter Eric Warr (18 June 1938, Kermanshah, Iran – 4 October 2010, Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, France) was a British businessman, racing driver and a manager for several Formula One teams, including Walter Wolf Racing, Fittipaldi Automotive, and Team ...
stating in
Monaco
Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (french: Principauté de Monaco; Ligurian: ; oc, Principat de Mónegue), is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Lig ...
that ''"If McLaren can build a fast car then we must be able to as well"''; the car's design and production was already compromised by incorrect aerodynamic data during testing and development at the March team's Comtec wind tunnel in
Brackley
Brackley is a market town and civil parish in West Northamptonshire, England, bordering Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, from Oxford and from Northampton. Historically a market town based on the wool and lace trade, it was built on the inters ...
. After Senna had won for Lotus at Monaco in
1987
File:1987 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes after leaving the Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, killing 193; Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, k ...
, Monaco 1988 proved a disaster for Lotus. Nakajima failed to qualify while Piquet, who had qualified in 11th place some 4.4 seconds slower than Senna's pole winning McLaren Honda, lasted one lap before retiring with collision damage.
Late in the 1988 season, former three-time World Champion
Jackie Stewart
Sir John Young Stewart (born 11 June 1939), known as Jackie Stewart, is a British former Formula One racing driver from Scotland. Nicknamed the "Flying Scot", he competed in Formula One between 1965 and 1973, winning three World Drivers' Cha ...
test drove the 100T at the
Snetterton Circuit
Snetterton Circuit is a motor racing course in Norfolk, England, originally opened in 1953. Owned by Jonathan Palmer's MotorSport Vision organisation, it is situated on the A11 road north-east of the town of Thetford and south-west of the cit ...
in
Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
, which was Lotus's test track at the time. Within a few short laps he identified the car's basic problems. He said that the car lacked rigidity and its chassis was flexing, despite its
carbon fibre
Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (American English), carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (Commonwealth English), carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics, carbon-fiber reinforced-thermoplastic (CFRP, CRP, CFRTP), also known as carbon fiber, carbon compo ...
and
kevlar
Kevlar (para-aramid) is a strong, heat-resistant synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, the high-strength material was first used commercially in the early 1970s a ...
monocoque
Monocoque ( ), also called structural skin, is a structural system in which loads are supported by an object's external skin, in a manner similar to an egg shell. The word ''monocoque'' is a French term for "single shell".
First used for boats, ...
, and that the chassis couldn't handle the abrupt power delivery of the turbocharged Honda engine which made the car difficult to drive, a common complaint of Piquet and Nakajima, as well as the team's test driver
Martin Donnelly. He also noted how cramped the driving position was and that the steering wheel and instrument panel were so close together that it made the panel almost unreadable. Stewart managed to spin and stall the car on one lap at the "Bomb Hole" corner when his driving glove was caught in the small space between the steering wheel and the top of the cowling and had to turn off the engine in order to be able to take his glove off to untangle it. He also said that the car was over-nervous and highly strung, and that ''"It was not a car that Nelson Piquet would have wanted to drive too many more times"'' and rated the car as ''"Perhaps one of the more disappointing cars I drove"''.
Excerpt from the 1989 documentary "Jackie Stewart's World of Speed" on Youtube
/ref> When questioned about Stewart's findings during practice for the season ending Australian Grand Prix
The Australian Grand Prix is an annual motor racing event which is under contract to host Formula One until 2035. One of the oldest surviving motorsport competitions held in Australia, the Grand Prix has moved frequently with 23 different venu ...
, Peter Warr refused to say what the Scot
The Scots ( sco, Scots Fowk; gd, Albannaich) are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic-speaking peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded t ...
had reported, only stating that he had correctly identified problems which the team was already trying to fix.
Nelson Piquet finished the season in sixth place with 22 points in defense of his title, picking up third places in Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, San Marino
San Marino (, ), officially the Republic of San Marino ( it, Repubblica di San Marino; ), also known as the Most Serene Republic of San Marino ( it, Serenissima Repubblica di San Marino, links=no), is the fifth-smallest country in the world an ...
and Australia. Nakajima finished 16th in the Drivers' Championship with one point from his sixth place at the opening race in Brazil. Lotus finished fourth in the Constructors' Championship with 23 points, a massive 176 behind McLaren.
At the end of the 1988 season turbocharged engines were outlawed, rendering the 100T chassis obsolete. It was replaced by the naturally aspirated, Judd V8-powered Lotus 101
The Lotus 101 was the car with which the Lotus team competed in the 1989 Formula One World Championship. It was powered by a Judd V8 engine and driven by triple World Champion Nelson Piquet and Satoru Nakajima, in their second and third season ...
for the 1989 Formula One season
The 1989 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 43rd season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It began on 26 March and ended on 5 November. Alain Prost won his third Drivers' Championship, and McLaren won the Constructors' Championship. ...
. And after 5 years at Lotus, Ducarouge left the team.
Complete Formula One results
(key
Key or The Key may refer to:
Common meanings
* Key (cryptography), a piece of information that controls the operation of a cryptography algorithm
* Key (lock), device used to control access to places or facilities restricted by a lock
* Key (map ...
)
References
External links
{{F1 cars 1988
100T