Success at the highest echelons of motorsport is a matter of marrying technological excellence with driving skill and team management, and this requires the careful management of resources to get right.
Traditionally, factory teams have had much larger budgets and the support of manufacturers to help ensure that every component is made with the pursuit of speed in mind, but an infamous example of what can go wrong with this approach was Lotus’ final attempt to race in GT Cars.
In 1997, grand tourer sports car racing was reaching new heights in popularity and at the top of the mountain were Porsche and Mercedes using purpose-built cars for the division.
Lotus had previously been competitive with a three-year-old Esprit GT1 but realised they needed to bend the rules slightly and create a purpose-built one-off car based on the Elise, known as the Elise GT1.
The problem was that the Elise was a very lightweight, relatively low-power sports car and thus needed to be made considerably bigger and have a larger engine in order to be competitive.
The Esprit’s V8 engine was not reliable enough so they opted to use a V8 engine from the Chevrolet Corvette road car and fit twin turbochargers to it to improve its performance.
At the car’s very first race in Hockenheim, Germany, four Elise GT1 cars were entered (including a private entry run by GBF) and every single one of them failed to finish due to alternator problems in the Chevrolet engine.
The next race at Silverstone, England was slightly better, in that whilst none of the factory entries finished, GBF’s entry did manage to complete the race distance, albeit 25 laps down and in last.
Only one car entered the prestigious 24 Hours at Le Mans race and only lasted 121 laps before the engine failed.
By the final two races of the season, reliability had become such an issue that they replaced the V8 engine with a cast-iron two-valve engine from a NASCAR stock car.
The factory team folded immediately after the end of the season and such was the bad experience of the team that Lotus have never raced in GT since.
However, attempts were made to race the car again in 2003, only for the car to last only seven further laps.