Visit to Lotus F1 Team

Yesterday we went to Oxford to visit the Lotus F1 Team factory. It was organised by the chap we met at the Supercar day. He has kept in touch and pulled a few strings with some of his contacts. The 90 minute journey wasn't too bad being mainly motorway but oxfordshire's rural roads aren't great. We arrived at 1pm and met up with Adam and a chap from Lotus called Luca who had kindly agreed to show us around.


Lotus, like every F1 team is currently in a compulsory summer shutdown, a measure introduced by the FIA to stop the bigger teams with unlimited budgets dominating. So we were unlikely to bump into Kimi or Romain and much of the place was being pulled apart for maintenance. We started by visiting the underground aerodynamic modeling centre which comprises an office with relatively ordinary looking computer workstations, however.....

.... next door was a room full of rows of servers stacked floor to ceiling worth an extra-ordinary £15m. Not deterred by this, Luke had no quarms arguing with Luca that the 15mm high windscreen was entirely unnecessary. If only we had visited 4 years ago, they could have saved themselves the fifteen million!

Luke offers his quality control services

"and move these lights"

We were then shown the suspension test rig. This would normally look fairly dull when it isn't bouncing an F1 car around but because it was being stripped down for maintenance, we got to see the workings underneath including the 250 tonne concrete bed which is suspended on a bed of air. We got to watch a video of the rig in action with the data from Monza recreating every bump and corner. Apparently drivers can tell you the circuit being replayed just by watching the movements.

After being shown the collection of past F1 cars including those driven by Alonso and Schumacher when they won world championships, we were shown some of the manufacturing processes including carbon fibre and titanium components. I got to hold Kimi Raikkonen's steering wheel and before we left, got see the current cars partly stripped down ready to be worked on again in a few weeks time in preparation for Spa.

PLEASE don't drop it
On the way out we had a second look at the trophy cabinets. The fact that even a third place race trophy looks like any other sports' world championship trophy, confirms the fact that Formula 1 is the world's most prestigious sport.

Thanks to the guys at Lotus for this rare opportunity, particularly Luca who spent 3 hours giving the tour and talking to me normally without patronising me, and to Adam for arranging it.


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