The first 'something for nothing' car had been completed in August and there were sneak testing shots of Nilsson driving it at Snetterton 'doing the rounds' by Monza time. It was a good consolation prize with which to finish Lotus's season of endeavour.īy this time, the Lotus 78 had already put a couple of months testing under its belt. In normal circumstances such behaviour would have been counter-productive, but as car after car dived into the pit lane for fresh rubber, their deeply-grooved rain tyres shredded by the drying track surface, Mario stayed out to win the race by just over a lap from his nearest challenger. An enormous amount of thought and effort was required to achieve a very small increase in performance. Although Chapman had built such cars in the Lotus 25, 49 and 72, now the technological climate was different. No longer was it possible to develop a totally new design concept with a stroke of the pen that would make your Grand Prix car a couple of seconds a lap faster than its rivals from the outset.
Brian Henton and Jim Crawford were too inexperienced and John Watson simply drove it at Nurburgring, offered little feed-back, politely said "very nice" and then went back to pursuing his career with Surtees.
It was a mutually gratifying split, but the succession of British drivers who tried the car were not able to help. Midway through the year, desperate that he should find somebody to set up the 72 for Peterson, Chapman released lckx from his obligation to Team Lotus. We toyed with taking it to Monza, but I thought everybody would build a wing car the moment they saw it. In addition, they both went their separate ways when it came to setting up the cars-and neither proved terribly effective in this task. Changes in tyre construction from Goodyear had rendered the 72 almost useless and neither Peterson nor his team-mate Jacky Ickx seemed to be able to do anything with it. The previous year, they had won seven events (with Fittipaldi and Peterson on the driving strength) and Ronnie's trio of 1974 victories were down to his instant driving bravado rather than the car's fundamental capability. It is a measure of the standards which the team sets itself that they look back on 1974 as a highly disappointing year, never mind the fact that Ronnie Peterson won three Grand Prix for them. It was shelved midway through 1974 and Lotus soldiered on with the 72. Intended to be a much lighter version of the 72, not only proved to be uncompetitive, but too heavy and fragile. They had won the World Championship with the Lotus 72 three years earlier and they were still using that same car the Ralph Bellamy-designed Lotus 76. Going back to 1975, one has to appreciate how things were developing at Team Lotus. The 78 won two more of the year's 16 races, so Lotus' complete tally is eight Grand Prix race triumphs, This compares to Ferrari's five, Brabharn's two (both under questionable circumstances) and one for Tyrrell.
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