1971 Lotus 56B

I took this photograph at the Donington Park museum in October 1989.

It's the 1971 Lotus 56B, a gas turbine powered four-wheel drive car that was one of Colin Chapman's innovative attempts to steal a march on the other F1 manufacturers. A gas turbine engine car, the STP-Paxton Turbocar, had run in the Indianapolis 500 in 1967 and looked like winning the race until a bearing failure caused it to drop out 3 laps from the finish. In 1968 Maurice Philippe had designed the Lotus 56 and Colin Chapman entered three of the Pratt & Whitney gas turbine powered cars for the Indianapolis race. Two of the cars, including one driven by Graham Hill, dropped out but the third car driven by Joe Leonard, who had qualified in pole position, suffered a broken fuel pump drive shaft nine laps from the end of the race when in the lead. The Lotus 56B was basically the same as the 56 with adjustments to the suspension to help the cars to handle right-hand as well as left-hand corners, and larger fuel tanks because the gas turbine engine was much thirstier than the internal combustion engines of the conventional F1 cars. It also had the aerodynamically efficient wedge-shaped body of the Lotus 72. The car wasn't a success in F1 for a variety of reasons - the larger fuel tanks made it much heavier than its competitors, the fact that there was no engine braking meant that the drivers had to rely solely on the brakes to slow the car down, and there was a slow response to the accelerator because of turbo-lag. The car only took part in three Grand Prix races in 1971, at Zandvoort where Dave Walker performed well on a wet circuit before spinning off and retiring, at Silverstone where Reine Wisell ended up eleven laps behind the winner and was not classified as a finisher, and at Monza where Emerson Fittipaldi finished in eighth place. The following season Lotus stuck with the more conventional Lotus 72, and Emerson Fittipaldi won the World Drivers' Championship with that car.