During his test drive at Silverstone, the author found that most of what he’d heard about the Lotus 30 over the years wasn’t necessarily true. Photo: Pete Austin
Racing car enthusiasts, on the whole, treasure every innovative idea manufacturers have managed to conjure up. However, Auto Union and Porsche were criticized for putting the engine in the wrong place. When Ferrari eventually got round to doing the same thing, they got taken to task as well. The Formula One boys tried four-wheel-drive and everyone laughed, and when Ken Tyrrell went to six wheels, well you could hear the collective jaws hitting the floor. There have always been skeptics, pessimists and naysayers.
But when it comes to cars getting a “bad reputation,” there are a few classics. The ATS F1 car is one of them. A seeming disaster in period, it is a car that has seen continued development in historic racing and is now a very nice car. The Scirocco of the same period has had a similar experience. However, there are few cars that have received a worse reputation than Colin Chapman’s first foray into big-engined sports cars, the Lotus 30. If you said Lotus 30 to a race follower in the ’60s, ’70s or even later, you might well be greeted with guffaws, and if you dared to mention the later Lotus 40, you got ten more.
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