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History
The company was founded by UCL graduate engineer Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman (Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman, hereafter Colin Chapman) and Lotus Engineering Limited by Colin Dare. The letter at the top of the Lotus logo is the initials of founder Colin Chapman.

There are many theories about how the name Lotus came to be. More specifically, there are speculations about lotus flowers that evoke daydreaming and lotus flowers that stand out in Buddhism and Hinduism. The founder Chapman often said the word “us lot”, which is rumored to have been translated into “lotus”. Others believe the name was suggested by Chapman’s wife and business partner Hazel. Whatever the true source of the name Lotus, the origin of the word ended up in a maze as Chapman declined.

In the past, due to financial difficulties, it handed over a significant stake to General Motors and was in the hands of Romano Artoli, an Italian businessman who briefly owned the Bugatti brand. Before the IMF, it was close to being acquired by Kia Motors, but in 1996, it was acquired by Malaysia’s state-run company Proton Holdings.

However, Proton Holdings also fell into a deficit and sold Proton, including the Lotus brand, led by the Malaysian government. Several brands, including Skoda, Renault-Nissan, and Suzuki, were only sucking their fingers, but in 2017, only two Chinese Geely Cars, which acquired PSA Group and Volvo, issued letters of intent to acquire and competed with each other.

Characteristics
It is a brand that aims for an ultra-light pure supercar, and most models have similar characteristics to motorcycles, with ultra-light bodies of around a ton or less and high-rotation engines from the RPM range with high maximum power. Therefore, you can experience acceleration that varies depending on the driver’s weight. Lotus’s sports car takes less than five seconds with only a 1.8-liter engine. In Lotus, there is no vicious cycle in which other supercars such as Ferrari increase the engine power again due to the increased weight and the increased body size to mount a heavy V12 engine.

It used as many engines as it had a rough history of several parent companies. The Lotus cars, which were first built after Colin Chapman founded the company, mainly used Ford engines, and the Lotus twin-cam four-cylinder engine was based on them. Europa used Renault engines, gearboxes, and transaxles, and later used Voxhole four-cylinder engines, Lotus’s independent four-cylinder, and V8 engines. After Chapman’s acquisition, General Motors used Isuzu Motors (M100 Elan), the Opel/Voxholze engine (shared with Europa S, Opel Speedster Turbo), and the Rover K-series engine, but most engines used since Proton’s acquisition have been modified to suit Lotus’s taste.

Ellis, currently the lightest, uses a 1.8-liter engine on an ultra-lightweight body weighing 890 kg, and from the 2012 Ellis, which came out in mid-2011, 1.6-liter and 1.8-liter engines are used. And Evora will use a large three-liter engine for the first time since Esprey. Currently, there is a high possibility of using a new four-cylinder gasoline/diesel engine produced in Volvo under the same geography. For example, some predict that small models, including Exy and Ellis, will use Volvo 4-cylinder turbo engines, while Evora and other smaller models will use hybrid combinations for high-power series 4-cylinder turbo.

It was so light that founder Colin Chapman openly said, “It’s good to be as light as possible (to the point where it breaks down immediately) if you can hold out until the goal point of race parking.” This does not mean that the stiffness of the body is poor. This is because cornering performance is poor if the body is weak. Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, the suspension was not very developed and the lightness was cornering, so it is said that some of the Lotus race cars in the past had their bodies split in two during the race.

Team Lotus
From Type 72 Lotus was sponsored by a tobacco company named John Player & Sons [10] after painting British-green livery until the 1970s, he competed as a livery decorated with gold bands on a black background. However, because of the sub-terminal, the company changed its name to John Player Special (11), and despite that, the so-called Black Beauty, the black gold reverie is considered one of the coolest in F1 history.

Type 72 was the most successful Lotus vehicle in history, with Johen Lint winning the 1970s (12) and Emerson Pitipaldi winning the 1972 World Championship. In 1978, Mario Andretti won the championship in Type 78/79, the team’s last F1 championship victory.

Since the 1980s, he has not won the Constructor championship due to the decline of Williams and McLaren. Still, many prominent drivers such as Nigel Mansell (1980-1984), Eyrton Sena (1985-1987), and Nelson Pique (1988-1989) passed by. Colin Chapman died of a heart attack in 1982, leaving the Type 93 turbo in the 1983 season as the last race car he designed.

However, even Nelson Pique moved to Benetton in the 1990s, accelerating the decline. I tried Lamborghini engines and brought rookie Mika Hackinen, but the car’s performance was still a mess, and in 1994, Johnny Herbert used Honda’s engine as a driver, but the name Lotus disappeared after the Australian GP that year. The team was sold to James Hunt’s older brother David Hunt, who merged with the Pacific team to play another year in 1995, but with little profit, even the Pacific team withdrew from the F1. When the team was disbanded in 1998, the original Lotus team completely lost its reputation.