The team formerly known as Renault officially launched its new Lotus era today by unveiling its new car with the relatively low-key target of moving up one place to fourth in the constructors’ championship in 2012. The Genii Capital-owned outfit revealed the E20 – the ‘E’ in reference to Enstone, the team’s home of 20 years – on the internet but, rather than a live stream, released a novel pre-recorded broadcast from its factory which included the car’s unveil, interviews with drivers and management, along with behind-the-scenes footage. The black and gold-liveried challenger features the in-vogue stepped nose, but is More…

The ambitious Lotus F1 team has announced that it will use gearboxes and hydraulics from Red Bull Technology next season – which it will marry with a Renault engine. The engine deal is likely to be announced shortly. Effectively it will have a back end similar to the one which is competing for the championship this year and this will provide not only better performance but also better reliability. This year, in common with all the new teams, Lotus has been using Xtrac gearboxes and hydraulics and the hydraulics in particular have proven unreliable. Lotus and Cosworth announced their separation More…

The row over the use of the Lotus brand in F1 has been bubbling under the surface for a long time and today it went public. Proton, the owner of Group Lotus, which makes road cars said that the F1 team had no rights to use the name Lotus. This followed an announcement at the weekend that Tony Fernandes’s Lotus F1 team had acquired the rights to the Team Lotus name from David Hunt, who has owned it since 1994. From next season Tony Fernandes’ outfit will be called Team Lotus. He has made this move in order to bring More…

The Lotus Formula 1 team is making some bold moves forward as it nears the end of its first season in Formula 1. The team, established exactly one year ago by Tony Fernandes, the Malaysian music to airlines entrepreneur and F1 engineer Mike Gascoyne, will soon be renamed Team Lotus and this weekend it inked a deal with Renault for a technical collaboration involving two years supply of engines, gearboxes and KERS system. The technical deal is similar to the one Force India enjoys with McLaren Mercedes. For a small team to get the entire drive train from an established More…

When I was doing some behind the scenes filming at the Lotus factory in Norfolk, I came across a room which houses the chassis mock up, made of what looked like clay, which the team built over the winter prior to building their first car. This is also where the drivers have their seat fitting, making sure they actually fit in the cockpit. It was amazing to see perfect replicas of the Cosworth engine, the fuel tank, the oil tank and so on, which the engineers and mechanics spent hours on, like a giant Lego set to make sure the More…

When Rubens Barrichello threw his steering wheel out of the car in Monaco on Sunday, the electronics engineers and the accountants at Williams will have screamed. Those things are packed full of incredibly complex electronics and are expensive – over £40,000 a piece! If you want to know more, I’ve done a behind the scenes video on the secrets contained in an F1 steering wheel and now seems like the perfect time to show it. The drivers are very busy at the wheel nowadays during a Grand Prix. In addition to the clutch and gear change functions on the back More…

Lotus unveiled their new team, car and drivers in London this evening. It was a professional and understated presentation, the key themes were passion and heritage rather than promises and hype. Team boss Tony Fernandes is a builder of brands and here he has pulled together various strands into this team, leaning heavily on the heritage of the Lotus name. But the Chapman family who founded Lotus are fully behind him and were at the launch, also behind him are Mike Gascoyne and his experienced technical team made up of former Toyota, Super Aguri and Renault staff. There are 160 More…

The new Lotus F1 team has revealed the scale of its ambition by announcing that Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen, both race winners in F1, will drive for the team in its debut season next year. From the point of view of the drivers this is a big vote of confidence in technical director Mike Gascoyne, who worked with Trulli at Renault and Toyota. Lotus boss Tony Fernandes has empowered Gascoyne, given him the resources he asked for to get the job done and to have two highly experienced drivers, both of whom are capable of extracting the maximum performance More…

Tony Fernandes, the team Principal of the new Lotus F1 team will deliver the keynote address on the first day of the 2009 Motor Sport Business Forum in Monaco. All eyes will be on the Grimaldi Forum next Wednesday morning as Fernandes, talks about his new team, his innovative ideas for sponsorship and monetisation of the team and his ambitions within Formula One. I will be putting the questions to him. Send me a suggestion for a question and if I like it and think it’s appropriate, I’ll add it to the list. Fernandes has been a sponsor in F1 More…