► A very personal interview with Colin Chapman
► Conducted shortly after his 40th birthday in 1968
► ‘I’m afraid I don’t always keep quiet when I should’
Colin Chapman turned 40 on May 19. Many years ago he vowed jokingly he would retire a millionaire at 40, and I wanted to find out just how jokingly that vow had been made. So early in April we talked at great length about the future of Lotus and of Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman, about his opinions, ambitions and possible plans without envisaging the one event that might change everything. Two days later the news came from Hockenheim. We had all come to think of Jimmy as indestructible—foolishly, perhaps, but with a driver so brilliant, who could win races in cars lesser men would have abandoned, and who led so many grand prix from start to finish as to make his rivals take the procedure almost for granted, we could perhaps be forgiven for never even mentioning the possibility of losing him. The nearest we came to it was when Colin said he would go on racing as long as Jimmy wanted to.
Not unnaturally, Colin’s first impulse on hearing of his tragic loss was to throw in his hand altogether, get out and away and never go near a motor race again. But when we talked again later in the month he pointed out that he has many commitments to fulfill, at least for the current season. He can’t run away from it all, and by now he has made up his mind that he will carry on—perhaps with only one car (for Graham Hill)—and review the situation at the end of the year, with a provisional plan to continue racing till the end of the present formula in 1971. But the question still remained—had he meant what he’d said so many years ago? Colin was emphatic. He’d meant it all right, at least about trying to become a millionaire. But, he added, don’t we all? And as to the retiring part—well, he could never envisage himself doing nothing. He would like to tackle new things, new objectives.
‘I want something that will allow me to take a couple of weeks off now and again to lie in the sun or go skiing or take a trip somewhere without feeling that the whole enterprise is going to collapse.’ This, of course, is why Colin is almost in-variably in charge of operations wherever Lotus race, and why he has been perched on top of a tool box or a pile of tyres on the pit counters of the world’s circuits for the past 10 years. He enjoys going Formula One racing more than anything else except perhaps flying.
His twin Comanche stands ever ready in the hangar immediately opposite the factory at Hethel, in Norfolk. At a moment’s notice it can be wheeled out and he can take off from his own airfield as easily as one would jump into a Mini and drive down to the shops. Over the last two or three years he has tried to organise things within Lotus so that he can concentrate almost entirely on racing and the design of cars, and now he means to extricate himself still further from the manufacturing side. Denis Austin runs the actual car company (‘and does it incredibly well’) and Colin can detach himself more easily than he has been able to since the days when Lotus was operating from part of a builder’s yard in Hornsey.
Then, of course, he never dreamed that the business would grow to its present proportions, nor had he planned when he was still an engineering student at London University to manufacture cars at all. It was because of a spare time hobby, first selling secondhand cars, then modifying and improving them before selling, and finally rebuilding a 1930 Austin Seven fabric saloon and transforming it into a trials car, that Lotus came about at all.
‘I was interested in cars and in making things —always had been from a very small boy. But I had no idea I would want to try to make a living from it. I was trained as a structural engineer and I was going to fulfill my ambition to make things by doing construction work, building bridges and roads and so on. It was only when I could see the possibility of marketing components to build competition and high performance cars—fun cars—that I felt it was reasonable to make a living out of it. Other-wise I would have started my own civil engineering business or something similar. I would always have wanted to be my own boss.’
Colin left university in 1949, and had never even seen a motor race when he entered his trials car for a club meeting at Silverstone. ‘Everybody just turned up and had a bash in whatever they’d got.’ The success story of Lotus from that point on is history, and well documented at that. Today, Elites, Elans and Europas grace—and with a Lotus that word means something—the roads of the world.
‘I always get a thrill seeing them on the road, especially when they are clean and fresh.
‘But I always feel I can improve on what we’ve already done. We have a development department which is constantly producing new variations, plus experimental cars that we might make—sometimes we even build one just to see what it will do, without intending ever to put it into production.’
He has never had any desire to expand the business, to become a major manufacturer. In fact he thinks chasing volume would be the biggest mistake Lotus could possibly make. The main reason it has reached its present size is that Colin feels anything smaller would not be able to compete at all. Although Colin does not want to regard America as the major market for Lotuses (it comprises about a third of their sales at the moment, and that is how he wants the position to stay) he does feel that American construction and safety rules will be picked up by British and other European manufacturers within the next few years. ‘You can’t close your eyes to the facts. Complying with American requirements probably absorbs all the profit we make on the US market. If you regard it on a short term basis you might say it’s a dead loss operation. But Sweden has already adopted the same rules, France will shortly, then England. Your market gets smaller and smaller, and suddenly you’ve nowhere to go.’
Of all the Lotuses that have been presented to an admiring world, it is the Mark 25—the first monocoque, which made its debut at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in 1962—that Colin personally looks back on with the greatest pride and satisfaction. ‘I was happy with that car. It was built in a rush and it turned out well. It performed beautifully first time out and stood us in very good stead for three racing seasons. It won the world championship for us, and again for Coventry Climax, and altogether it was a tremendous success. I suppose one of the reasons I liked it so much is that I actually dealt with almost every detail myself, as opposed to some of the other cars for which I lay out the basic scheme before handing over for someone else to fill in all the details.’
A great many people will remember Colin as a racing driver, and he still gets occasional tweaks of nostalgia. ‘I did enjoy racing and I sometimes feel I would have liked to carry on. But it just became impossible to drive and run the business. I took up flying, and that gave me a bit of an outlet.’
He is an excellent pilot, there’s no doubt of that. The only time I’ve had the slightest qualm flying with him was once when he let his five-year old son Clive steer the Comanche a little over Salisbury Plain! Clive is already convinced that he is going to work at Daddy’s factory and fly his planes for him— Lotus aeroplanes, of course.
We’ve been waiting for some years to see Colin produce an aircraft, and now I believe the prospect is really in sight. ‘I think that here and now there is a tremendous opportunity for the production of a British light aircraft. I would like to build a Lotus of the air. The trouble with a lot of aircraft in the range I have in mind is that they are either Mini-Minors of the air or Rolls-Royces. There is no one who produces a medium-sized fun aeroplane. They all try to justify what they produce in terms of business journeys from A to B.
Piper saw what was needed and went ahead and did it. I wouldn’t try to cut their prices, but to go in for a more advanced product. They’ve grown too big to be able to experiment—there is scope for quite revolutionary changes in aircraft, particularly in power units. No one should still be building planes with piston engines and propellers and out of date things like that. Producing a light aircraft is something I feel this country should be doing and we ought to do it very successfully. There is a huge market in America, and their tremendously high costs of labour and materials and facilities mean that we should be able to produce better aircraft less expensively.
‘If the people trying to do it now were not so steeped in the outlook of what I call the traditional aircraft industry, then it could be done. They have lived off government contracts and Ministry work for so long that they are no longer competitive, no longer commercial in the light aircraft field.’
Colin is certain that Britain has the skill and know-how and the men and the facilities to build the best— and the best-selling—light aircraft in the world. He does not think, however, that he is qualified to design it himself. He has, as he puts it, ‘a rudimentary idea of aerodynamics and a reasonable idea of structures’ but what he wants to do is get hold of an enterprising young designer, to whom he would give the right facilities and finance.
And after this objective has been realised, what then? One thing is sure, there will never be a time when Colin Chapman will sit back and sink into complacency. He has achieved about everything he set out to do so far, even to reaching millionaire status. He wanted to get into Formula One racing, and he did. He wanted to enter a Lotus at Le Mans, and did. He wanted a stand at the London motor show, and he got it. He wanted to win the world championship, and he did. He then set his sights on Indianapolis, and pulled off that victory as well. In fact he has swept the board in motor-racing.
There are a good many people who say he has done all this by being ruthless, by stepping on colleagues, employees, friends, drivers and mechanics without much regard for their feelings in the process of getting to the top. Some say he is two-faced, insincere; some even go as far as calling him a downright crook. I tackled him on the subject of his personal relationships, and of this business of being ruthless.
‘I wouldn’t say I was ruthless. I do find that life often puts you into impossible situations where you find yourself having to make a decision between two evils. Life is never black and white, never a simple question of good or bad, and quite often there comes a point where you just have to upset somebody. I have some firm principles which I try to stick to.
‘I’m afraid I don’t always keep quiet when I should, though. I pipe up and say things that would be better left unsaid. But I try to run the whole of my business and motor-racing as straight as it is possible to do so. It is one of my big disappointments in life that the more successful you appear to be the more people seem to be jealous. It is very difficult to be successful in business without upsetting somebody. I might add that it is never my direct rivals who run me down.’
So what of Chapman at 40? Has he found compensations for getting older? ‘Yes, fortunately. You feel more self-assured, less insecure.’
He is still one jump ahead of most people: intelligent, dynamic, amusing, also demanding, exasperating and capable of a smart about-face if he feels like it. I doubt whether he will be able to replace Jimmy in his life, to get that almost telepathic rapport with a driver – or a friend. And this makes Colin Chapman a sadder and more human person than he was at 39.
