Looking at the F1 cars that fought the 2008 season, and the ones scheduled to combat for honours in 2009, it is possible to discern a certain commonality of design.

  1. All have monocoque bodies made of composite materials.
  2. All have a mid-mount engine, i.e. positioned behind the driver.
  3. All have strut suspension at the rear.
  4. All use the engine and transmission as structural parts of the car.
  5. All have have aerodynamic parts producing downforce to vastly improve grip.
  6. All have radiators away from the front of the car, to reduce air resistance at speed.

All of those key design features were brought together in F1 by Lotus founder Colin Chapman, and he did it more than 40 years ago. Since that time, every racing car designer working in the open-wheel formats such as F1, Indy, etc. has used the Chapman recipe.

It is not suggested that Chapman invented all of the concepts listed. Citroën, for example, had used monocoque construction, in which the car is one complete shell instead being of a body fixed to a separate chassis, for a road car of the pre-war years.

John Cooper had originally adopted a rear mounted engine for his racing cars for practical reasons; he used a motorcycle engine and chain drive. Drivers in the Cooper soon realised that having the engine close to the centre of the car made it corner more nimbly than front-engined competitors, and in due course, the Cooper marque was rewarded with two F1 Constructor's World Championships in 1959 and 1960.

This article is not a biography of Colin Chapman, nor is it a history of the Lotus marque. Do you need to know that the Lotus 7 road car Chapman designed in 1957 is still produced today as the Caterham 7? It is only my intention here to pay homage to one of the greatest names in motor racing history, so I will skip past his early years, his training as a structural engineer, and his establishment of Lotus Engineering in 1952.

It is possible to identify precisely when Chapman and Lotus changed F1 forever.

After WWII the major racing teams such as Mercedes, Ferrari, and Maserati continued to produce what were essentially pre-war designs. Their cars had front-mounted engines and were constructed as space-frame chassis covered with a skin of aluminium or alloy. The success of Cooper's mid-engine design force them to follow suit, but the cars were still of the old construction style.

In 1962 the Lotus 25 was introduced. Its stressed monocoque construction was new to F1; it was lighter, stiffer, and stronger that its contemporaries. The engine and transmission were load-bearing, with rear suspension parts bolted to them. That one design is easily the most important in F1 history.

Jim Clark scored his first Grand Prix victory in the 25, at Spa. He missed out on the world title when his Coventry Climax engined seized during the final race of the season in South Africa, but the next year the glittering prizes came his way, and Lotus went on to win seven world championships.

Not resting on his laurels, Chapman continued to bring engineering ideas to F1. He introduced aerodynamic wings to produce downforce and took that further with his revolutionary ground effect cars, in which a semi-vacuum was created under the car body. He developed active suspension and a dual-chassis concept that partially insulated the driver from the road battering suffered by a low-slung car.

One by one, Chapman's advanced developments were banned by the sport's ruling body, the FIA, and he became disheartened. F1's age of innovation was over.

Colin Chapman died of a heart attack in 1982, he was 54 years old. He was a great man.