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1960 Lotus 18 - Motorsports Almanac

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<strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong> FIA Formula 1-car<br />

John Surtees at the <strong>1960</strong> British GP<br />

Technical Specifications (<strong>1960</strong>)<br />

In 1959 - by which time the Coventry<br />

Climax engines had been stretched to 2.5liters<br />

- Colin Chapman continued with a<br />

front-engined F1 car but the car achieved<br />

little and so in <strong>1960</strong> Chapman switched to<br />

rear-engined cars with the <strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong>. The<br />

Type <strong>18</strong> had a lower frontal area and<br />

carried the fuel nearer to the centre of<br />

gravity. It also featured an all-new<br />

suspension. The first <strong>Lotus</strong> victory came at<br />

Monaco that year when Stirling Moss beat<br />

the dominant Ferrari team in his Rob<br />

Walker <strong>Lotus</strong>. The first Team <strong>Lotus</strong> victory<br />

was in 1961 when Innes Ireland won the<br />

US GP. The <strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong> was also successful in<br />

Formula 2 and Formula Junior and over 120<br />

Formula Junior type <strong>18</strong> were built during<br />

<strong>1960</strong>.<br />

CHASSIS<br />

Type : Four l-in. dia. steel tubes.<br />

ENGINE<br />

Model : Coventry Climax FPA<br />

Type : 4-cylinder inline, gear-driven DOHC, 2VPC<br />

Capacity : 2495 ccm<br />

Bore x Stroke : 94.00 x 89.90 mm<br />

Max Power : 240 bhp @ 6750 rpm<br />

Max Torque : 210-215 Ibs-ft @ 5000 rpm<br />

Compression ratio : 12 :1<br />

Fuel system : 2 x twin-choke 58 mm horizontal-draft Weber carburettors.<br />

TRANSMISSION<br />

Gearbox : 5-speed <strong>Lotus</strong> with dog-engaged constant mesh gears.<br />

Clutch : Borg&Beck multiple dry plates.<br />

Final drive : Pinion of front of gearbox output shaft, and ZF spin-limiting differential.<br />

Drive shafts : Rear wheel drive shafts with two universal joints apiece.<br />

SUSPENSION<br />

Front : Double unequal lenght wishbones, anti-roll bar in lower wishbone, coil-over shock<br />

dampers<br />

Rear : Lower reversed wishbones (drive shafts act as upper wishbones) and two trailing<br />

radius arms per wheel, anti-roll bar and coil-over shock dampers<br />

BRAKES<br />

Front : Girling hydraulic discs, outboard<br />

Rear : Girling hydraulic discs, inboard<br />

WHEELS<br />

Front and rear : 15" <strong>Lotus</strong> Bolt-on cast magnesium "wavy web" wheels<br />

TYRES<br />

Front : Dunlop Racing R5 5.00 x 15"<br />

Rear : Dunlop Racing R5 6.50 x 15"<br />

STEERING<br />

Type : Rack and pinion.<br />

DIMENSIONS<br />

Wheelbase : 2286 mm<br />

Front track : 1321 mm<br />

Rear track : 1353 mm<br />

Length : 3429 mm<br />

Width : 1422 mm<br />

Height : 660 mm<br />

Dry Weight : 349.3 kg (normal start weight : 430,9kg)<br />

Fuel tank : 143 litres in a nose mounted tank.


LOTUS <strong>18</strong><br />

Colin Chapman established <strong>Lotus</strong> Engineering in 1952 and it was an almost immediate success with its Mk 8<br />

sportscar. A new Formula 2 regulation was announced for 1957 and in Britain several organizers ran races for<br />

the new regulations in the course of 1956. Most of the cars entered that year were sportscars and they included<br />

a large number of <strong>Lotus</strong> 11s, led by the Team <strong>Lotus</strong> entries for Chapman, Cliff Allison and Reg Bricknell. The<br />

cars did well but Cooper, which had produced a single-seater F2 car was able to win most of the races with<br />

Roy Salvadori. Chapman won one race at Brands Hatch. The following year the <strong>Lotus</strong> 12 appeared. There were<br />

no victories, competition from Cooper being intense but in 1958 Allison won the F2 class in the International<br />

Trophy at Silverstone beating Stuart Lewis-Evans's Cooper. As the Coventry Climax engines were enlarged in<br />

1958 to 2.2-liters Chapman decided to enter Grand Prix racing, running a pair of <strong>Lotus</strong> 12s at Monaco in 1958<br />

for Graham Hill and Cliff Allison. These were replaced later that year by <strong>Lotus</strong> 16s. They were still not<br />

competitive against the 2.5-liter machinery. In 1959 - by which time the Coventry Climax engines had been<br />

stretched to 2.5-liters - Chapman continued with a front-engined F1 car but the car achieved little and so in<br />

<strong>1960</strong> Chapman switched to rear-engined cars with the <strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong>. By then the company had expanded to such an<br />

extent that it had to move to new premises in Cheshunt. The <strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong> had a low frontal area and carried the<br />

fuel nearer to the centre of gravity. It also featured an all-new suspension. The first <strong>Lotus</strong> victory came at<br />

Monaco that year when Stirling Moss beat the dominant Ferrari team in his Rob Walker <strong>Lotus</strong>. The first Team<br />

<strong>Lotus</strong> victory was in 1961 when Innes Ireland won the United States GP. The <strong>Lotus</strong> <strong>18</strong> was also successful in<br />

Formula 2 and Formula Junior and over 120 Formula Junior type <strong>18</strong> were built during <strong>1960</strong>.<br />

LOTUS EARLY YEARS UP TO THE 2.5 LITRE COVENTRY CLIMAX POWERED TYPE <strong>18</strong><br />

At Monte-Carlo in May, <strong>1960</strong>, a combination of Stirling Moss and the design skill of uncountable people and<br />

unthinkable overtime hours brought the highest reward to the youngest racing car manufacturers in business.<br />

<strong>Lotus</strong> won their first Grand Prix. It is very unlikely that the car which did it would have been recognized by a<br />

certain elderly lady who thirteen years ago sold her Austin Seven to the 20-year-old Colin Chapman, and<br />

thereby launched the original <strong>Lotus</strong>, Mark I. Not only the boss is young, however. The <strong>Lotus</strong> Engineering<br />

Company (now transformed into five separate companies) came into official being in January, 1952, and it was<br />

only three years later that Chapman himself became a full-time member of the enterprise he had founded; fulltime,<br />

that is, in the sense that he gave up his regular job to devote the day as well as most of the night to <strong>Lotus</strong>.<br />

To win a Grande Epreuve twelve years after starting from almost exactly nothing is a formidable achievement.<br />

The Austin Seven was the sole item of stock remaining unsaleable after petrol rationing in 1947 had<br />

demolished the fortunes of Colin Chapman and his fellow engineering student, Colin Dare, spare-time<br />

second-hand car dealers. In 1948 it was stripped, rebuilt, registered for no reason Chapman has ever disclosed<br />

as a "<strong>Lotus</strong>" and entered with great success in a large number of sporting trials. Mark 2, also Austin Sevenbased,<br />

was a compromise machine for trials and 750 Motor club racing; Mark 3 a purely racing sports car;<br />

Mark 4 a return to trials cars, but one of the most important in <strong>Lotus</strong> history, for it was ordered and built<br />

specifically for sale to a paying customer. It coincided with the setting up of the business, in 1952, which was<br />

not even meant in early days to manufacture cars at all, but simply to build and convert components for do-ityourself<br />

amateurs. The backyard industry bore further fruit in the following year with a complete, original doit-yourself<br />

sports car using production Ford suspension parts, skillfully adapted to one of the earliest<br />

progenitors of today's almost universal space-frame chassis. The Mark 6 (Mark 5 was a stillborn type) first<br />

carried the hallmark of Chapman the theoretical, "first-principles" engineer, much influenced by aircraft<br />

design, in striving for chassis strength where it was needed without an ounce of extra weight where it was not.<br />

One other factor of <strong>Lotus</strong> design had not yet arrived. In the Mark 6 era the part-time band of <strong>Lotus</strong> men was<br />

joined by Mike Costin, then working at de Havilland. The Mark 8 sports car was a combination of chassis by<br />

Chapman and body by Mike's aerodynamicist brother Frank, also of de Havilland, who in-augurated the<br />

modern trend for functional streamlining in racing cars—Vanwall and Lister are others which have benefited<br />

by his slide-rule. By this time the little company, or rather the "Team <strong>Lotus</strong>" offshoot which was formed by<br />

spare-time enthusiasts to go ahead with the Mark. 8 project, was embarking in the field of almost pure,<br />

scientific racing car design. The streamliner could easily have been the origin of the story about building a<br />

chassis space-frame around a canary; if the bird gets out, there must be a tube missing. At any rate it was said<br />

that 12 hours were needed to remove the engine, even if the cylinder head were taken off first. Motoring<br />

yearbooks, or memories of countless race meetings all over England and, increasingly, the Continent, recall the<br />

long line of successes by <strong>Lotus</strong> sports cars. Mark 9 was another pointer towards the machine that, a bare five<br />

years later, would run away from the world's best at Monaco. Into the Chapman frame and the Costin body<br />

went that phenomenon of post-war motor racing, the Coventry-Climax 1,100 cc. engine which was based quite<br />

closely on a power unit designed for trailer fire pumps. As with their Cooper rivals, the next big <strong>Lotus</strong> step in<br />

the direction of the Grandes Epreuves came with the 2-litre Formula 2 in 1957. Colin Chapman himself had<br />

already edged a foot into the door of Formula I racing by redesigning the 1956 Vanwall chassis (and<br />

incidentally, modifying it further against a concrete post during practice for the French Grand Prix), and in<br />

addition was to do some development work on suspension for B.R.M. The first single-seater <strong>Lotus</strong> must be<br />

almost the only racing car to have been seen for the first time not on a starting grid but on a stand at a motor<br />

show. In spite of the fact that the Frank Costin also had been actively concerned with the Vanwall, the new car<br />

was no beauty, but it appeared, glistening with scarcely dry paint and bristling with ideas, on the Earls Court<br />

stand of the only manufacturer of racing cars who was also a full member of the S.M.M. and t.i <strong>Lotus</strong>. The


engine, of course, was the new twin-overhead-camshaft, 1,475 cc - Coventry-Climax, offering 140 b.h.p. or<br />

more. The gearbox was a brand new design which fitted—theoretically at least—into the <strong>Lotus</strong> tradition of<br />

maximum efficiency with minimum weight. Although it brought with it a number of teething troubles, largely<br />

because it was put straight into service to get its testing under actual racing conditions, it has contributed to the<br />

present success of the Grand Prix car. The Formula 2 machine on its Earls Court appearance had the then<br />

fashionable de Dion rear axle, but with a car even lighter than other <strong>Lotus</strong>es there was obviously a case for<br />

independent rear suspension, and the single-seater was the first to have the "Chapman strut". The 2-litre was<br />

not a tremendous success. On occasion it produced great speed, but time and again was let down by the<br />

trans-mission (owing mainly to lubrication troubles) or by breakages here and there about the chassis, which<br />

caused some speculation as to whether, with a car weighing not much more than 750 lb., <strong>Lotus</strong> had gone a bit<br />

too far in the pursuit of lightness. Undeterred by a tendency for theory to outrun execution, Chapman, having<br />

broken into full-scale Grand Prix racing with the "stretched" 2.2-litre version of the Formula 2 Coventry-Climax<br />

engine, appeared at Rheims in July, 1958, with an entirely new version of his lightweight—slim, low and<br />

worked over by Frank Costin to the point where it looked like a Vanwall just back from the shrinkers. The new<br />

car, unfortunately, had no more success than the old, through a variety of troubles and plain misfortunes, such<br />

as a stone through the radiator at Rheims in 1959. In two years the Grande Epreuve score for <strong>Lotus</strong> was two<br />

fourth places (one with the old car, one with the new), a fifth and three sixths. For most of 1959 the Formula I<br />

car, like its Cooper counterpart, had the new 2-litre Climax engine. There may have been something that even<br />

Chapman and his brilliant design team had to concede, in the suggestions that pure science could be carried<br />

too far. The car which has so changed the fortunes of <strong>Lotus</strong> in the top rank of motor racing is almost a<br />

compromise with reality. It is true that the weight-saving and low driving position made possible by a rear<br />

engine are in line with tradition and <strong>Lotus</strong> thinking, though the firm was one of the last to follow fashion in<br />

that respect. The only partially ducted radiator, on the other hand, looks like a departure from Frank Costin's<br />

love of small, streamlined apertures, calculated to produce good cooling with little drag. Like the rear-engine<br />

layout, the rear suspension of the new Grand Prix car is a <strong>Lotus</strong> development of a scheme used first by other<br />

constructors. Effectively a wishbone suspension, it uses the half-shaft on each side as part of the upper<br />

wishbone, and has aroused some comment on account of the very low bottom links. The career of this car has<br />

been meteoric. On its first appearance, in the Argentine GP in January, it led the race for a time by a big<br />

margin, and only fell out just before the end after spinning off, Returning to England, Innes Ireland beat Moss<br />

in the 1959 Cooper and Brabham in the <strong>1960</strong> works model at both Goodwood and Silverstone Rob Walker<br />

having taken one of the new <strong>Lotus</strong>es into his own private stable Stirling Moss then opened the European<br />

Grand Prix season proper by his unchallengeable per-formance at Monaco. Since then, with Moss convalescent<br />

after the accident at Spa, Coopers appeared to have come into their own once more. Thanks mainly to the<br />

<strong>Lotus</strong> team, however, <strong>1960</strong> Grand Prix racing was a far more open affair than it seemed at first to promise.<br />

IMAGE GALLERY<br />

Innes Ireland at the '60 British GP Stirling Moss at Zandvoort in '60<br />

SOURCES<br />

http://www.grandprix.com/gpe/con-lotus.html<br />

http://www.grandprixdriver.de/<strong>1960</strong>_<strong>Lotus</strong>%20<strong>18</strong>_The%20Basis_.htm<br />

© Compilation by Rainer Nyberg 2002-04-23 Fact-sheet 02/090

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