Did Lotus ever win F1?
Lotus in Formula One Team Lotus, a sister company of Lotus Cars, competed in Formula One between 1958 and 1994, winning seven constructors’ titles and six drivers’ titles between 1963 and 1978. F1 driver Kimi Raikkonen nearly bankrupted the Lotus team by being too good. His contract said that he would be awarded €50,000 for every championship point scored. Lotus thought their car would be so uncompetitive that year that it would not be a problem.Team owner Gerard Lopez, whose Lotus outfit has been waiting for a crucial buy-in deal by the investment group Quantum, has now revealed that Raikkonen is in fact still owed some money. Asked if Lotus has paid the Ferrari-bound Finn in full, he is quoted by Finland’s MTV3: Not entirely.By the end of 2013, Kimi revealed the team still owed him wages and bonuses — a big reason why he left to return to Ferrari in 2014. F1 #KimiRaikkonen #Lotus #F1History.
What happened to the Lotus F1 team?
The demise of the Lotus F1 team was down to a multitude of factors, including extortionately expensive driver contracts, unpaid tax bills, and spiraling management costs. Here, we’ll dive into how the pressures that pulled the iconic F1 team apart and see what happened to it after its troubled 2015 season. The number of top drivers seriously injured or killed in Lotus machinery was considerable – notably Stirling Moss, Alan Stacey, Mike Taylor, Jim Clark, Mike Spence, Bobby Marshman, Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt and Ronnie Peterson.
Does Lotus have an F1 car?
The Lotus name returned to Formula One in 2010 as Tony Fernandes’s Lotus Racing team. In 2011, Team Lotus’s iconic black-and-gold livery returned to F1 as the livery of the Lotus Renault GP team, sponsored by Lotus Cars, and in 2012 the team was re-branded completely as Lotus F1 Team. The demise of the Lotus F1 team was down to a multitude of factors, including extortionately expensive driver contracts, unpaid tax bills, and spiraling management costs.The fundamental problem was that Lotus had become too dependent on one man’s genius. Chapman had never built the institutional systems and processes that could survive his absence. Technical knowledge was sorted in his head rather than in databases. Strategic decisions were made by intuition rather than analysis.