AN OVER ENGINEERED FAILURE? The Story of the Lotus 80 (1979)

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:14]dominant racing cars. There's been quite a few through Formula 1 history, and I'm sure everybody watching this video is thinking of one right now. the Red Bull from 2023, the Mercedes W5 and six and seven and eight and so on, as well as the F202, F204, the Red Bull from 2011, and before that, the McLaren MP44 and MP42. I'm sure that I'll be told I forgot one or I'll be asked what about, but it's really not that deep. But these are cars that made F1 amazing for fans of those teams and the drivers that weren't in them, but at the same time made life a misery for the rest of us.

[00:00:52]It's just one of those things really like V. Just look at the controversy surrounding the West Ham equalizer the other day. It's great when you're on the receiving end, but not so much for everybody else. But for each of those dominant cars, there is usually a trend when it comes to the domination. Even if the other teams catch up, there's still an element of it there. The 2023 Red Bull went into 2024 just as hot as it left 2023 and won something like six of the opening seven rounds of the season.

[00:01:20]Ferrari won in 2001, 2, 3, and four with Schumacker. And there's also the Mercedes cars that dominated between 2014 and 2020. Usually, it takes a rule change or a huge fumble for things to make that car go from hero to zero, or at least hero to meh. For Mercedes, the dominance was halted through the trimming of the floor for 2021 that hurt the low sun cars, at least hurt them more than the ones that went more face down and booty up with regards to rake angles. Ferrari were fumbled by the 2005 tire changes because they had to build a car that couldn't do what it was doing previously on tires that now had to last a whole race weekend. One of the worst rule changes in history really. Williams got messed about by the rash banning of driver aids and Red Bull's dominance got affected by not just a hailmary upgrade from McLaren but a colossal muckup with their own progress on that car. But there is another way of losing your advantage and that is just simply overengineering the car that succeeded the previous one. And that's exactly what happened to Lotus when they designed the 80. Now, they say that more is better, but there can be a time where it's actually a bad thing. Cholesterol, blood pressure, members of the Foo Fighters, but for Lotus, that was what they were aiming for when they were designing their 1979 car, which would be the Lotus 80. It was a car that was going to be their equivalent of the Slim Shady LP, Never Mind Bat Out of Hell, The Color and the Shape, or Dittle. the second album that was better than the first one ever was. Bat out of Hell wasn't Meatloaf's first album. I've learned something today. It's also one of the first albums I ever had.

[00:02:53]But to set this story up, we need a recap of the car that preceded the Lotus 80. That being the 79. Now, the Lotus 79 is well, it's an icon. There's no other way of getting around it. It's also revolutionary. And also, I apologize in advance if I trip up over any numbers.

[00:03:11]For one, it's me and numbers, and that's going to happen anyway. But it's more to do with the fact that the 79 was used in 78, and the 80 was going to be used in 79 because Colin Chapman thinks the 79 was an improvement on the 1977 car that was a 78. So, everything is like one year behind ahead.

[00:03:31]I don't know. Basically, what had happened was Chapman had been studying the Deavlin Mosquito and wondered if he could do some reverse engineering on it.

[00:03:39]The Mosquito was using its hot air outlets to generate lift. So maybe Lotus could do the inverse and produce downforce instead. While the 78 was the first, the 79 is the icon. But both cars worked in pretty much the same way. To generate the downforce, Lotus fitted two tunnels in the cipods to exploit something called the Bonoui principle.

[00:03:58]To summarize, when fluid enters an enclosed space, it accelerates and then the pressure drops. Seal off that low pressure pocket and hey presto, you're generating downforce. In Lotus' case, they were producing so much downforce, the rolling road was sucked up into the Venturi tunnels and Goodyear had to develop harder tires to fit that car.

[00:04:17]And actually, while we're on the subject, that's part of the reason why the car was so good. you know, when it was actually working. The other cars weren't producing enough downforce to generate the heat in these new harder compound goodier tires. The Lotus could generate the heat and it was going faster. But Lotus had one massive problem on the horizon. The second everybody else knew what they were doing, they'd be copying it. The arrival of the 78 had actually been delayed to try and stop people cottoning on. But then the 79 arrived for the 1978 season and was full-on ground effect and produced something in the region of 30% more downforce than the 78 did which was sort of an in between of the 72 and 79 as 30% more than the previous car rather than everybody else's on the grid. Lotus just knew that if the 79 proved to be a gamecher then in 1979 everybody else will be hopping on the same design trend and they did. For 1979, the Williams FW07, Ligier JS11, Ferrari 312 T4, Tier 009, McLaren M28, and others were sporting the same boxy side pods to fit their own Venturi tunnels in. So naturally, Lotus needed to get back ahead of everybody else because once everybody had caught up, the advantage that the 79 had enjoyed was gone. So they took the 79 and tried to crank it up to 11, but it ended up being a total bust. Chapman's reasoning was, "If some was good, more must be better." The prospect of a bunch of 79 clones on the 1979 F1 grid worried Lotus a lot, much in the same way that everybody turned up with Lotus clones at Indianapolis in 1966.

[00:05:48]Because the 79 was enjoying a dominant season, work could start on the next car pretty much immediately. Lotus had also decided that the days of using cars multiple years in a row was coming to an end. McLaren had retired the M23. The 312T was on its last legs, so having another 72 was out of the question for them. Formula 1 had reached a point where it was evolve or die. Motorsport magazine back in 2004 mentioned that the end goal for Lotus in this period was something called dragless downforce.

[00:06:16]Instead of producing downforce from the front and rear wings like a Formula 1 car normally would, well, I mean, the floors and diffusers do a lot of the heavy lifting these days, don't they?

[00:06:24]Yeah, all right. Sucking, but you know what I mean. Cars from the '90s were mostly topside arrow, and cars of the mid70s were also topside arrow. The idea from Chapman and team was to have every single point of downforce come from the Venturi tunnels. And by the time the early 80s rolled around, it was not uncommon to see cars without a front wing. I don't know why. I think it's because the teams realized, oh, the cars producing enough downforce, we don't need one, and therefore would have less drag at the front. So, the question was, how do you achieve all of that with the technology, knowledge, and everything else of the time? The answer was more Venturi tunnels. It does go without saying that this was the late 1970s.

[00:07:03]They didn't know what we know now. It would still be a few years before McLaren started using carbon fiber in the construction of their cars and maybe I don't know 10 or 12 years from Sam Michael hacking telemetry computers and even more years still from computational fluid dynamics. So, as just mentioned, the answer was more tunnels. But where do you put them? Well, in the nose cone, you silly Billies. This car effectively had three Venturi tunnels, so one more than the previous car. One in each of the side pods and the other in the nose with that third tunnel exiting just ahead of the driver. The other two worked as normal, extending towards the rear of the car. So, in its original design format, the car had no front or rear wing like other cars did and was like those flying wing designs of aircraft that you might have seen like the B2 bomber or that experimental German thing that was flapping around towards the end of the war. So, essentially the whole car was the wing and the entire car was producing downforce with the tunnel in the nose essentially acting like the front wing.

[00:08:03]The side pods then finish on the inside of the rear wheel so that the venturi tunnels could be made as long as possible. And these side tunnels were sealed off with skirts so that everything was sealed off and sucking as much as possible. I went on Alamy to see if there was a picture of the car without the wings, but alas, no. So, it's our factor mods for this video, just like the good old days of these videos. But then again, that does mean we can get some close-ups of the car.

[00:08:25]And the amount of downforce produced was lots, many lots. But it was all dependent on the skirts working. Peter Wright mentioned in the Motorsport magazine article that I alluded to earlier that there was an S-bend around the wheels that kept jamming the skirts and stop them sealing off the low pressure pocket that was produced under the car. But there was one other issue.

[00:08:46]Chapman apparently telling Colin Chapman that something wasn't working wasn't like poking a hornet's nest, but dropkicking one. Lotus had run into this weird problem where they were producing too much Downforce, which sounds a bit like being kicked out of Guns and Roses for doing too many drugs. Except that actually happened with Steven Adler, didn't it? But it led to a problem that manifested itself in the 2022 regulations. And this might be something you might be quite familiar with.

[00:09:13]Pposing. So, what happens with pposing is ground effect sucks the car down. And if it sucks the car down too much, the suspension runs out of travel and is just riding the bump stops unable to go further because it's run out of travel.

[00:09:25]Because of this, the air rushing through the car stalls and the ground effect stops working. So, the car rises back up again, which then allows the aerodynamics to start working again as normal. The process repeats itself over and over and over again, and there's no way of stopping it because, well, good luck fighting the laws of physics. Back in 2022, the teams that were having bad porpasing were suffering from it in two different ways. Some cars had very high frequency, low amplitude porpusing, which led to Carlos Science, Daniel Ricardo, Lando Norris, and Kevin Magnuson complaining of nerve problems, while Mercedes suffered from low frequency, high amplitude porposing, which is what caused Lewis Hamilton and George Russell their back pain. The way I understand it is that it was happening because the cars were running the floor so that they were so low when the arrow was at maximum effect. But at high speed, it just became too low and store the arrow out. And this is what was happening with the Lotus 80. So Lotus quickly abandoned the flying wing design and stuck conventional front and rear wings on it. And the only way of getting rid of the pposing was to stick even stiffer suspension on it with Andretti Talent Chapman time and time again that the suspension was too soft and needed to be even stiffer. But the issues with the car meant that service was going to be limited and Lotus had seen the rest of the competition catch up. How limited was that service? It was just four races and only Andretti would race the car.

[00:10:44]The delays with getting the car ready meant that Lotus had to persevere with the 79 for the opening four rounds of the season and the competition had indeed caught up. The 78 had been a basic principles design. The 79 was taking it to the next level. But in 1979, the other teams had somehow managed to outen engineer Lotus despite being at least a year behind them. It was Ligier that did the best. Initially, Sherard Dukaroo had designed something called the Clappair, which translates to flapper. It was essentially a thermostat, but for downforce. There were flaps in the Venturi tunnels that would open up when certain amounts of pressure were detected inside the tunnels, but Ligier had to keep them a secret in case the other teams protested it as a movable aerodynamic device. So what would happen is the flaps would bleed off excess downforce at higher speeds and all but eliminated the porposing. Because Ligier had come out with their ground effect cars before Williams and Ferrari had, they took victory at the season opener in Argentina. The competition was now so good, if in a bit of a gray area, that Lefit had outqualified the 79 by over a second and then won the Argentine Grand Prix. It was no fluke. It was genuinely fast and then pissed all over the Lotuses again in Brazil. Lefit winning both races. And to add to Lotus' misery, Ligier was still a newish team that didn't have the experience of Lotus or Ferrari. They were French. They took long lunches and were work shy compared to the British shed dwellers. And not only that, Ligier was now using the same DF and Hu and gearbox combo that Lotus had been rocking for over 10 years and now they were getting stomped on. But Lotus had bigger problems to worry about. And one of those was the development of the 80. and the 79s given to Andretti and Reutman had been made obsolete already. Not only that, Carlos had driven the 80 and hated it and refused to drive it, sticking with the tried and tested 79 for the entirety of the 1979 season. And Carlos had actually done okay in it all things considered.

[00:12:36]He was second in Argentina, third in Brazil, fifth at Ky Army before retiring at Long Beach, which funnily enough is where the wheels started to fall off Eligier. Andretti meanwhile was fifth in Argentina, retired in Brazil, was fourth of Kyle Army and also at Long Beach.

[00:12:52]Andretti however did finally get his hands on a Lotus 80 in time for the Spanish Greybury at Harama where he finished a respectable third. But there were some asterisks or caveats, whatever you want to call them, to do with this particular race. Number one being that Reutman in the older 79 had finished in second and third was as good as it was ever going to get for the Lotus 80. In higher speed corners, the car was okay.

[00:13:15]But the second the camber was off, he hit a bump or had to go through slower corners, it was a mess. It was a car that needed the perfect operating conditions to work right almost. The center of gravity on the car also caused the low pressure area under the car to move about unexpectedly, which only made the pposing worse. The car qualified fourth for the Belgian corporate Zolder, but Andretti never made the start due to problems with the car. At Monaco, the car was just crap because of the problems at slower speeds and he also retired at Djon. Suspension issues at Monaco and the brakes at Djon. So basically typical Lotus fragility. After the French Grand Prix at Djon, the 80 was quietly retired and never heard from again. Andretti went back to his title winning Lotus 79 where he finished out the rest of the season. But it didn't get any better for him. He finished quite low down come the end of the season in one of the worst title defenses ever seen in Formula 1. Reutman would be seventh at the end of the season while Andresi was down in 12th.

[00:14:12]Everybody had done much better than Lotus that year. But really what had happened was the problems with the 79 hadn't been as obvious in 1978 because it was so overpowered and then they manifested themselves properly in 1979.

[00:14:24]The newer cars were stiffer while the 79 had a bit too much flex. It's just that the 79 was so fast in 1978, it wasn't noticeable. Now it was. In hindsight, working on the 80 was a waste of time because Reutman, who was in a 79 all through 1979, had scored more points than everybody else except Shakar in the first half of the season. If the 79 had been made stiffer and the other kings were ironed out, then Lotus probably could have been closer to the top than they actually were come the end. Put simply, they just had the power of being first in 1978. The 80 appears to be a failure for a multitude of things.

[00:14:59]Firstly, being overengineered in places, and second, being lulled into a full sense of superiority because Lotus were the first people to do this sort of thing. When the others arrived with their cars, they were stiffer and more reliable. So, Lotus now looked like they had a dud in the 79 and again with the 80. While the 80 had a decent first outing at Spain, it was clear that the car still needed an awful lot of work.

[00:15:20]Andretti did clang a part of his car lapping Tombbeay that might have attributed to him finishing behind Reutderman who was second in that same race in the older car. But it could simply be that the Lotus 80 was a bit like the Sega Dreamcast or Resident Evil Outbreak created too early. With today's engineering knowledge, this car could have absolutely worked. But while previous Formula 1 cars could have been designed, built, and run competitively just based off the intuition of designers, things like ground effect, it became about things like optimization and science. The 80 had a cuttingedge aerodynamic package, but without CFD and other computers, it would have been a lot of trial and error and money spent on it to get it to work properly. One thing to note here is that Lotus had lost its JPS sponsorship and was now backed by Martini, Essex, and others.

[00:16:04]So, the money might not have been there.

[00:16:06]Innovation had gone beyond what was feasible with the stuff to hand. Formula 1 had reached a point where the idea simply wasn't enough. you needed the brains to pull it off, which is probably why the likes of Patrick Head and Ron Dennis started to emerge in the opening part of the 80s and then you had the Adrienne at the tail end of the 80s.

[00:16:23]Chapman's era was coming to a close and after 1982, Lotus would never be the same. But that's not to blame anybody at Lotus for getting it wrong because they simply didn't know any of this at the time. Chapman might have been thinking, "We innovated with the 49 and we innovated with the 72. We innovated again with the 78 and with the 79 on top of that. So for the 80, we'll just do it again. But the idea was bigger than what they could work with in that time period. Remember earlier in this video I said that the prospect of using a Lotus 72 type arrangement where it was updated over multiple years wasn't appealing to Lotus because that era was coming to a close with the M23 bindoff and the 312T also coming to the end of its life. The problem is that using the 79 for at least another year might have actually been the optimal strategy, but that's hindsight for you.

[00:17:14]But there's probably another universe out there where the car did work. It's just one of those things where, well, it simply didn't. The other cars that came out were simpler but worked better because people realized what they had to do. And it wouldn't be the first time that we'd see something overengineered in Formula 1, and it's certainly not the last. Mercedes and their hide pods spring to mind. Give it another 10 years and maybe some fat bloke from the Midlands will make a video about that as well. It might not be me, but it could be me. Will I still be around that time?

[00:17:43]I don't know. So it seems a bit weird then that they spent all this time and money and resources designing this brand new car to supersede the previous car which was already half decent and you know make this new car even better than the previous one ever was only for it to turn out that the older car would have been enough had they just put a bit of time and effort into it to stiffen it up as the case was with everybody else coming in with their better cars than the 79. But I guess that's just Formula 1 really. sometimes even the best mess it up. So then a look at the Lotus 80 and how it was essentially overengineered and might have been a bit too forward thinking for the time. If this has been interesting for you and you learned something here today, then do get a like dropped on this video so I know I did a good job. And for more stuff like this from the channel, get subscribed and also get the bell on so you never miss out on anything else that I do around here. Massive thanks as ever go out to the Rad Lads over at Patreon for the continued support. Now, if you want to help with the image purchases or any other bills that I pay around here, there's a link to Patreon in the description along with links to Discord, socials, affiliates, and other bits and bobs you might want or need to know. All the super thanks for one and done donations and memberships for those who want to do Patreon, but signing up for Patreon is too much effort and you just want to keep things on YouTube. So, until next time, I've been Ad Mill. Have a great day wherever you are and goodbye.