28 replies to this topic

[Colbul1]

https://www.bbc.co.u...eshire-65417113

 

Good to see Lola Cars is being revived once more with plans for the future.

[Sterzo]

Yes, there's a thread about it here:

 

https://forums.autos...-being-revived/

 

Must admit, I find all the spurious revivals of old names - Delage is the latest - a spoiling of history, but then I'm a grumpy old git.

[Nigel Beresford]

I know some of the people involved very well. Although I tend to be the same as Sterzo regarding the appropriation of classic names, in this case they are very good people and some of them are steeped in Lola heritage. As someone whose family Lola links go back to ‘62 I’m pretty good with this news.

[Michael Ferner]

Another new company. So sad that there are not enough new names.

[Gene]

While I love to see a great old racing name revived, I still wonder if there's a market for another racing car manufacturer. A bunch of years ago another racing engineer and I did a business analysis of the racing vehicle manufacturing industry with the idea of maybe starting another to compete with Lola, Reynard, and Ron working at home in his office (LOL), ect. What we found was, at the time, the majority of the series were either "spec car", or limited the number of constructors. There was very few series in the world where a company could construct a car, sell them, or race it themselves. Besides F1, Formula Ford was the biggest single market where you could sell cars. The conclusion was days of Ralt being the "GM" of the racing industry, selling 54, F3 cars was gone.

 

That said, I still wish the new Lola guys good luck and helping make several series a lot more interesting!

[Nigel Beresford]

The wider reaching effect of the consolidation of the racing car manufacturing industry seems to be a loss, perhaps forever, of generations of engineers who originally spent their autumns and winters designing cars which they then debugged, raced and developed through the spring and summer. One learned an awful lot when following this process, liaising with drivers, mechanics, engineers, designers and suppliers. People in F1 and WEC teams are now so siloed that they know everything about a small area of the car. That’s not their ‘fault’ - it’s the inevitable consequence of the way investment and growth has driven things. Personally, I am happy to be the age I am, having clipped the end of the era when you actually drew bits for all sorts of areas of the car on a board, and then went and raced the car. Nowadays track engineers in most of racing (obviously not F1 or WEC and other series, but generally speaking…) receive a sorted “production” race car designed and made in a factory in Italy or Germany (and other places). A car made down to a price (which is a huge challenge - we at Penske and Tyrrell were blessed to not have to deal with that) and pretty much debugged. So nowadays many track engineers focus is much more on what the sensors are telling them and figuring out changes in software. That problem of fixing cracked disc bells or failed gear selection parts isn’t there any more for them. It’s a shame because I loved dealing with that stuff, and I used to spend hours and hours staring at the car thinking about how to do things better or nicer, but things are just different now. I guess you don’t miss what you never had, and by the year there are fewer and fewer of us who were “lucky” enough to have been through it.

[Gene]

I totally agree with you Nigel. I'm so glad I got into the business when I did, and then, got out when I did.

 

Equally as important as providing cars, Lola, Reynard, and March/Ralt also provided entry points for young engineers to get into the industry, learn car design, working within a design team, and how to deal with a demanding Tech Director (LOL). After a few years of post graduate training they went on to the F1, WEC or a host of companies supplying the racing world. Ron and Ralt were a lot like Roger Corman is in the movie industry. Just about everybody who's anybody in motor racing engineering got their start there or worked for Ron sometime in their career.

[Doug Nye]

So much is said about this country's flourishing motor sport industry - but it does seem to me, as Nigel infers in his wonderful insight above, that with so many pure-bred racing car constructors now based in foreign parts, the British industry's hard-engineering core has in reality become dispiritingly hollow; more or less 'regulated' out of too many markets worldwide. In one respect it could be argued that our successive representatives in high FIA office have over many years played a very poor hand on behalf of our national series-production racing industry.  In that respect it's not only Westminster politicians who have let our country down.  

 

DCN 

Edited by Doug Nye, 27 May 2023 - 17:45.

[john aston]

The biggest  problem is lack of opportunity , in a motorsport landscape dominated by tiresome spec formulae ,and with single seater racing on life support . In the past we had FF1600 (still the best series ever for close racing ),. FF2000,F3 , F5000 ,  F2 and even national F1 . None was a spec series . Then they arrived - but we still had lots of single seater racing , most recently Formula  Renault(in which I saw Raikkonen and Hamilton win - at Croft ! ) , the slightly odd GB 3 (Poundshop old style F3 , nothing like FIA F3 ) GB 4  and the BTCC support F4 . It is slim pickings , and the only way you will see single seaters in club racing is historic stuff . 

 

Obviously we have spec formulae to 'keep the costs down' which is why  rich dads now spaff hundreds of grand a season on little Johnny's F1 aspirations , by indulging his racing in thin  grids of identical and often hugely dull cars.  

[Nigel Beresford]

Indeed. It sounds pompous but little of the content of these cars reaches the standard of finesse of design or manufacture that was being achieved 20 years ago. The real villain of the piece is, of course, homologation, which ties your hands so tightly. Whereas one could have a field full of Lolas, Marchs or Reynards that were all subtly different (or not so subtle, in the case of the Reynards we ran at Penske), nowadays you can barely change anything. This has snuffed out mechanical creativity and hence opportunities for innovation, enhancement and employment.

Edited by Nigel Beresford, 28 May 2023 - 08:06.

[Doug Nye]

Precisely my point - the inevitable dumbing-down result of spec-Formulae specified by...the sporting authorities to focus attention almost entirely upon the driver "because that's what the public wants".  And our 'representatives' (drawn not from the public but mainly from years of motor sports involvement at some paper-shuffling level) colluded in this process - which admittedly seemed like quite a good idea at the time, but which in hindsight has diminished hard-engineering expertise, knowledge, experience, enterprise and potential commercial success - rotting the industry from the inside out.

 

DCN

[Allan Lupton]

Yes Doug has summed it up well: the lack of permitted engineering experimentation also means there is nothing to attract engineers from other fields.

[AJCee]

I have so little to add to the last seven posts other than “exactly”.
I totally agree with John, for me FF1600 in its pomp was fantastic racing, and I know that this member of the public doesn’t want more spec series. I’ve said before, the blend of driver, designer and engineer skill is what delights me. It should take all of those elements.

[guiporsche]

It's easy to talk about production moving to foreign land because of all sorts of shady motives but the point was that Britain dominated those lesser series until the 1990s. If Lola (twice), March, and Reynard failed, and spectacularly at that given their past and once dominant market positions, they only have themselves to blame. Hybris and terrible investment-technical choices come to mind, because the opportunities in an ever-changing racing, political and economic environment were there as well to those established players with tradition and supposedly, unrivalled technical nous.

 

The story, for me at least, is how a company like Dallara, starting when it started, became what it became by taking advantage of those same opportunities, growing and expanding gradually and cautiously while all the other big names failed. Were Dallara English, paeans would be sang to it on a daily basis by Motorsport Mag and others...

All the rest, from this side of the Channel at least, is a typical story of Britain's self-inflicted industrial wounds, observable since long to historians but especially around 2016 or thereabouts... 

Edited by guiporsche, 28 May 2023 - 13:18.

[Nigel Beresford]

Yep. I don’t know about “shady motives” (what does that mean?) but I was about to write much the same thing (from the English side of the Channel). I don’t have time right now to go into detail but, as someone who worked at Ralt, and was an end-user and directly involved in technical liaison as a customer of Lola, Reynard, Dallara, GForce and (latterly) Spark I can tell you that generalisations cannot be made.

Edited by Nigel Beresford, 28 May 2023 - 18:38.

[Rob Miller]

British shipbuilding, motorcycles, aeroplanes, automobiles, computers, televisions, and so on. Perhaps most of the best brains went into the City of London? That's where the money's kept.

[robjohn]

    On another level – Nostalgia – any description of Lola's history should mention F5000, where (in my memory) the marque became dominant in the 1970s.
    Lola's "solo" attempts at F1 were short-lived failures but the BBC writer perhaps understates its record. It designed and built cars for several F1 teams, from the competitive Bowmaker-Parnell Lolas in 1962-63 through Honda (the Hondola), Embassy Hill and Larousse to Scuderia Italia in 1993.
    And the T70 GT was magnifico.

    Rob J

 

Edited by robjohn, 29 May 2023 - 05:20.

[Sterzo]

 Perhaps most of the best brains went into the City of London?

 

No, that's where I worked.
 

[AJCee]

No, that's where I worked.

With all due respect to those I studied with who went into the City, indeed they weren’t the ones with the sharpest intellects.
They were however, able to afford new clothes on a regular basis which was more than those of us who stayed in research…

[guiporsche]

Yep. I don’t know about “shady motives” (what does that mean?) but I was about to write much the same thing (from the English side of the Channel). I don’t have time right now to go into detail but, as someone who worked at Ralt, and was an end-user and directly involved in technical liaison as a customer of Lola, Reynard, Dallara, GForce and (latterly) Spark I can tell you that generalisations cannot be made.

 

'Shady': merely a reference to the hypothesis, which seems to me to have been more or less vaguely alluded to in a previous post (but maybe I was reading too much into it), that by tightening regulations, conjuring sporting officials and European manufacturers somewhat managed to block out of the market UK constructors. And in the case that it happened  , it would still not explain the general but varied debacle of British sides. 

 

I was deliberately oversimplifying but, at the same time, when one reads about the histories of March, Reynard, and Lola.... In any case, as a matter of principle, I agree with you (and how could I not). The problem is that we are simply lacking good narratives about the fate (and survival) of those manufacturers. I think I'll be speaking in the name of everybody here if I say that I hope you will eventually find the time, one day, to put your experiences on paper. Few people must have had experience across all those companies and 'we' really need a modern update to the Mike Lawrence narratives. 

 

At the same time, I remain amazed how little interest there is in Dallara's trajectory. The man is the closest to a modern Enzo (together with Penske, all three obsessed with motorsports, with driving forwards and winning, Penske especially). The little published in Italian is superficial and essentially consists of company brochures. At first glance, Dallara disproves every lazy stereotype about Italian motorsports and yet he clearly did not do it all by himself. That story since 1972 is yet to be told properly: of how the company developed; of why they built chassis for certain series and not for others; failures and what they learnt from them; which and when foreign engineers came in to shore up their capabilities; capital investments and what Dallara did differently from everybody else.

Edited by guiporsche, 02 June 2023 - 08:51.

[GazChed]

'Shady': merely a reference to the hypothesis, which seems to me to have been more or less vaguely alluded to in a previous post (but maybe I was reading too much into it), that by tightening regulations, conjuring sporting officials and European manufacturers somewhat managed to block out of the market UK constructors. And in the case that it happened , it would still not explain the general but varied debacle of British sides.

I was deliberately oversimplifying but, at the same time, when one reads about the histories of March, Reynard, and Lola.... In any case, as a matter of principle, I agree with you (and how could I not). The problem is that we are simply lacking good narratives about the fate (and survival) of those manufacturers. I think I'll be speaking in the name of everybody here if I say that I hope you will eventually find the time, one day, to put your experiences on paper. Few people must have had experience across all those companies and 'we' really need a modern update to the Mike Lawrence narratives.

At the same time, I remain amazed how little interest there is in Dallara's trajectory. The man is the closest to a modern Enzo (together with Penske, all three obsessed with motorsports, with driving forwards and winning, Penske especially). The little published in Italian is superficial and essentially consists of company brochures. At first glance, Dallara disproves every lazy stereotype about Italian motorsports and yet he clearly did not do it all by himself. That story since 1972 is yet to be told properly: of how the company developed; of why they built chassis for certain series and not for others; failures and what they learnt from them; which and when foreign engineers came in to shore up their capabilities; capital investments and what Dallara did differently from everybody else.

Dallara's story is one I would love to read as well.

[Michael Ferner]

Seconded.

[E1pix]

As one with a soft spot for Lola since about 1972, this is great news.

We’ve only been to one IMSA race in 29 years, the 2016 Petit Le Mans. All weekend was talk of it being “Lola’s last-ever professional race,” which was sad enough. Worse still was one of the two Lolas breaking early, and then the second one coming down the hill at pit-in in flames right before the race’s end.

While I was somewhat pleased to take three photos of the marque’s final moment, perhaps the last ever taken on track, the moment made me sad enough to well up a little. But don’t tell anyone, so glad I kept that to myself.

Oh, wait...

[amerikalei]

    On another level – Nostalgia – any description of Lola's history should mention F5000, where (in my memory) the marque became dominant in the 1970s.
    Lola's "solo" attempts at F1 were short-lived failures but the BBC writer perhaps understates its record. It designed and built cars for several F1 teams, from the competitive Bowmaker-Parnell Lolas in 1962-63 through Honda (the Hondola), Embassy Hill and Larousse to Scuderia Italia in 1993.
    And the T70 GT was magnifico.

    Rob J

Back when Lola was dominating F5000, I recall hearing my first mention of Dallara in one of the magazines, alongside a picture of a striking Group 5 Fiat X1/9.  Next time I heard the name was probably 25 years later.  There's certainly a story there I'd be interested in.

 

X1/9 Dallara info: https://x19world.de/...chichte_en.html

[sabrejet]

Sad to read some of the comments above, when in fact the reality is not quite as dire as it might seem. There are still manufacturers in the UK designing, engineering and racing their own cars and/or engineering those of others. 

 

See Force, DJ, Gould, Empire, OMS, TKD, GWR and I'm sure many others I've forgotten to mention. Sean Gould races his own car, as do Steve Owen, Bill Chaplin and Terry Davis (the latter racing his own engines no less!), and you'll also find them engineering the cars they have sold to others. Ian Dayson and Graeme Wight, Jr also engineer the cars they've designed and built.

 

So our talent is safe in this wonderful corner of the motorsport world. Just don't tell anyone or they'll regulate it.

[john aston]

True - I've been to Harewood hillclimb today in fact. Where I saw a former Brabham F1  driver , still competing , but now in a Cooper Mark XI 500 . Any guesses ? 

 

Richard Robarts 

[sabrejet]

I dare say someone has compiled a list of self-built hill climb cars, but aside from one-offs, there have been quite a few marques (maybe stretching the definition a bit) over the years which have made multiple cars. The Steele 'Martlet' series and Tony Pashley's 'Marengo' trilogy spring immediately to mind. 

 

Special mention too for Peter Radnall, who competed in hill climbs a while back in a Force, and not only designed and built his own cars (Landars, various) but also a folding bicycle. 

[jeffbee]

Nothing to do with Lola, but didn't Dallara design the De Tomaso F2 car for 1969, and the F1 for 1970?

[bsc]

Nothing to do with Lola, but didn't Dallara design the De Tomaso F2 car for 1969, and the F1 for 1970?

Gianpaolo Dallara did design the cars - although it predated the formation of the Dallara company by a year or two.