Colin Chapman |
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Biography
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Colin Chapman page on 23 February 2021, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman, CBE was an influential English design engineer, inventor, and builder in the automotive industry, and founder of Lotus Cars.
In 1952 he founded the sports car company Lotus Cars. Chapman initially ran Lotus in his spare time, assisted by a group of enthusiasts. His knowledge of the latest aeronautical engineering techniques would prove vital towards achieving the major automotive technical advances for which he is remembered. His design philosophy focused on cars with light weight and fine handling instead of bulking up on horsepower and spring rates, which he famously summarised as "Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere."
Under his direction, Team Lotus won seven Formula One Constructors' titles, six Drivers' Championships, and the Indianapolis 500 in the United States, between 1962 and 1978. The production side of Lotus Cars has built tens of thousands of relatively affordable, cutting edge sports cars. Lotus is one of but a handful of English performance car builders still in business after the industrial decline of the 1970s.
Chapman suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982, aged 54.
| Date | Document Name & Details | Documents |
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| 9 May 1969 | To: Colin Chapman, Lotus Engineering Ltd. From: Jochen Rindt | Text - 1 page |