Colin Chapman

Once upon a time, I bought a Lotus 6.

And I thought the reason I bought it is because there was an outside chance that the chassis had been welded by the hand of Colin Chapman.

And my kid and I did a few events in this thing.

We told a caterer to buy it, and as far as he was concerned, it was a car with terrible brakes and terrible gear change, and that's all he cared about.

I was actually at the first chicane and as soon as the accident happened, I ran straight up the track.

and onto the track and I was very near everything and I remember as if it was yesterday the medics carrying Ronnie on a stretcher towards the ambulance and Ronnie sitting up and looking at his legs on the stretcher and basically you know I immediately felt oh he's okay he's obviously got leg injuries and Colin Chapman was running towards me And I remember saying to Colin, Colin, Ronnie's okay.

It looks like he's got bad leg injuries, but he's okay.

Which is, you know, I regret saying that now, obviously, because he wasn't okay.

I've always felt that.

And, you know, we'll never know for sure, will we? But I have spoken to Sid about, I did speak to Sid about that quite a lot.

And I don't know, I have told this story before, but as a punchline to that story, the next time Colin Chapman saw Sid, which I think was in Canada, he, And Sid told me this.

Colin asked Sid exactly what happened to Ronnie and how he could have passed away from those leg injuries, basically.

Yeah, that was my period.

You know, I was just discovering motor magazines and reading about Jimmy Clark racing Colin Chapman in Lotus Elites.

And, oh, God, I got, you know, sitting in the bush, you know, in the middle of the dust storms and reading about these people.

I thought they were gods.

Fast forward to the 1955 and 1956 time frame, and the boss at Lotus was approached by an engineering student looking for a summer job.

That boss, of course, was Colin Chapman, and that student was named Keith Duckworth.

Motivated and working cheaply, Duckworth was a model employee and found a fast friend in Mike Koston who immediately seemed to recognize just how brilliant this young guy was.

Upon his graduation from college in 1957, Duckworth was offered an engineering position with Napier, the famed British engine building firm, but the siren call of race cars was simply too loud.

Fix it.

And cheaply.

Oh, and while that was happening, deal with the metal summit abrasive Colin Chapman, Lotus' legendary owner, and Keith's boss.

After a year of trying every possible solution under the sun, the only real fix that Duckworth came up with was having all new, wider gear sets made for all the existing transmissions.

And when Titus saw the guests on a Sunday afternoon, he'd have these books with photographs.

I found out later he had some superb photographs of Colin Chapman, Graham Hill, people from that era.

And one particular photograph of Titus sat in a racing car.

Brother Titus said he'd never known anything else but living in a community, that he'd never owned a house or a credit card.

Sir Jackie Stewart famously called it the worst car he's ever raced due to its extremely light, dangerous and fragile construction.

Lotus F1 founder Colin Chapman was famously obsessed with lightness in Formula 1 and this extended to the road cars Lotus made.

This reputation for lightness unfortunately coincided with many deaths.

Tara Brown, heir to the Guinness fortune, crashed her Lotus Elan into the back of a parked bus and was killed upon impact.

And that exact policeman arrested them.

I think he's also the guy that arrested Colin Chapman in 65 as well.

Quite a famous guy.

I mean, that was in the days when the police had more power than the track director or the marshals or anybody else.

If the drivers weren't around, nobody worried about it.

You could talk to the chief engineers.

I could go up to Mario Fogheri, Derek Gardner, whoever, and ask them a question, Colin Chapman.

And the drivers, if they turned up, oh, hi, Ronnie.