Caterham CT01 F1: The pointless 2012 F1 car that won millions in prize money

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]A Formula 1 car from a British kit car manufacturer best known for its slightly anacronistic Lotus 7st style cars. A car which came from a team which was at the time locked in a bitter dispute with Lotus. And a car which ultimately scored no points in the Formula 1 World Championship, but may have been worth tens of millions in prize money. This is the story of the first Katum F1 car, the Katerum CT1. Katerum F1 actually started out as the Malaysianowned Lotus Racing team in the 2010 F1 season. A link on that controversial project is above right now. It was one of three allnew teams joining the grid that season. In 2011, the team changed its name and became Team Lotus, much to the annoyance of the Lotus car company, which wanted to get the rights to the Team Lotus brand back. And we'll get back to that.

[00:00:54]But staying on the topic of identity changes during the 2011 season, it was announced that the then team Lotus organization, which was the brand name of One Malaysia Racing, which was Lotus Racing, the new team that started in 2010, that team had acquired the Katerum car company and would race in Formula 1 as Katrum F1 in 2012. The links between Katerum and Lotus are extremely strong.

[00:01:19]Katrum is named after the small British suburb of Katerum south of London where the company started operating and that company was a key dealer selling Lotus 7s in the 1950s and 1960s and eventually it purchased the rights to the Lotus 7 design in the 1970s and continued to sell popular kits and complete cars based on the design to people wanting to build the car at home or just wanting a lowcost track experience car. Over the years, the Katum 7 has become an iconic design in its own right. But the various variants of a low-budget 1950s sports car are a very long way from Formula 1.

[00:01:56]Tony Fernandez, who owned one Malaysia racing, clearly wanted a road car company to go with his Formula 1 team.

[00:02:02]It was part of a wider lifestyle business project encompassing travel with his airline and hotel brands and lifestyle and entertainment ventures as well. and so the car company would have been a good fit. Under Fernandez ownership, Katerum reportedly attempted to acquire the rights to the out of production Lotus Elise S2 as the basis of a new Katerum production car following the steps of the Lotus 7 and the history of the Katerum car company.

[00:02:27]But of course, the relationship between Fernandez and the management at Lotus was far from good at this point and the deal didn't come off. So instead of doing that, the company then set about developing an allnew sports car in the same vein. the Katerum CTO2 or Katerum Technology O2 also known as the Katerum C120 and a partnership was reached with Renault Alpine for joint development of that car and that deal between the two companies was closely linked to the team's engine supply deal in Formula 1 as well. So, while the step from low-budget kit cars to Formula 1 does seem like a giant leap, it was actually quite a logical step and the result of this was the Katum CT1, which was in fact the very first 2012 F1 car to be revealed, albeit in CGI form. And I suspect the team possibly regretted being the first team to appear because, well, it wasn't pretty. When the Renault powered car was being designed and even when the first manufacturing work had begun on the car, it was planned to have been called the Lotus Type 129 following the team Lotus type 128 of 2011. So on this point, we probably need to quickly discuss Lotus type numbers. The CT01, as I mentioned, was originally designed to be the Lotus T129, but Lotus at that point didn't see the cars produced by the one Malaysia racing team, aka team Lotus, aka Lotus Racing, aka Kater F1, by that point, as being true Lotuses.

[00:03:54]Apart from the first one, the 2010 car, the type 127, which was given a proper Lotus type number, so probably should be considered a true Lotus. However, the Lotus Type 129 designation was then apparently allocated to the Colin Collers Lotus branded Lemon prototype.

[00:04:12]And that LMP1 car later became known as the Lotus P101 and then the CLMP P101 and later the Enso P101. And we'll get back to that and its links back to Katerum. However, there was an actual Lotus Type 129 officially released some years later and it's a two- wheeled vehicle. the Lotus track bike which is used for Veladrome events. So I hope that all clears that confusion up. So back to the T129 sorry the CTO01. The new Lotus sorry Katerum CTO1 was then the third design from the team and its second Renault powered design. Its rather distinctive nose shape was the result of a new for 2012 regulation designed to improve safety. This was the year of the rather ugly stepped noses on Formula 1 cars. And it came about as a result of a rule change reducing the maximum nose height but not changing the regulations regarding the maximum chassis height which resulted in a really awkwardl looking step on most cars. In fact, only Marissia and McLaren managed to design cars which didn't feature that ugly nostep. Despite looking very abrupt, the teams found that the nosteps didn't really make a great difference in terms of the aerodynamic package of the car. So they just remained on the cars and the aim of the stepped layout was to ensure the chassis was as high as possible to get as much out of the air flow underneath the nose and around the leading edge of the floor. So the long fin nose and step on the nose of most cars was the result of this rule change. The CTO1 featured a conventional front suspension layout with double wishbones and push rod actuated torsion bars and damper systems. As with all modern F1 cars, the CTO1 featured carbon carbon brakes. You can see the layout quite clearly here with the disc and caliper visible, but built up with the so-called cake tin and the brake cooling ducts. You can see that the ducting seems so much bigger than more modern designs. It's huge compared to a 2026 F1 car, for example.

[00:06:07]The roll hoop design was a significant departure for the team from the Lotus T128 which featured a rollover blade type structure which it felt gave aerodynamic gains. But those gains probably weren't enough to justify the complexity of going for that blade type structure. So instead for the CT1 the team used a circular air inlet with twin exposed rollover support structures and that is very conventional in terms of the car's design. In terms of cooling, the car's side pods were somewhat shorter than they had been on the T128 with the coolers leaning forwards in the pods in the conventional manner. A crucial factor for the car's development was the fact that the Katerum team switched wind tunnels during that car's development from Aerolab in Italy to Williams in the UK. CFD computational fluid dynamics was of course also used by the team as well, but correlating two separate wind tunnels and the CFD package and the real car would have been something of a challenge. And it turned out it very definitely was. The switch and wind tunnels resulted in a discrepancy in the cooling data on the car as the two tunnels were producing really quite different results on the air flow through the coolers and as a result the CTO1 was a little overcooled at some points of the season. However, at its roll out, the car looked to be struggling with some of the body work around the exhaust. Now, this wasn't purely aerodynamic. It was just probably a packaging issue with those exhaust tail pipes blowing too much hot gas onto composite structures that weren't fully treated to deal with it. However, the car's design ended up being a bit too conservative in terms of its overall cooling layout. The very large cooling outlet fitted to the rear of the car in preseason testing was found to be excessively large. A smaller version was developed and at higher average speed tracks, a smaller version again was introduced on the car. And this all came about because of that discrepancy in the wind tunnel data. In fact, the CTO1 owed a lot of its rear-end design to the 2011 championship winning Red Bull RB7. And the green car featured the very same 7-speed transmission from the Red Bull as well as its hybrid system. This was the first car from the Katrum team with an electric motor alongside the combustion engine. And that was a 60 kW electric motor with batteries arranged at the front of the carbon fiber transmission casing as well as alongside it. And that was quite a unique arrangement. Using this transmission limited Kim in terms of its rear suspension layout to the RB7's inboard pickup points, which meant a pull rod layout was essentially imposed on the team. I'm not sure they entirely minded that. Like the RB7 and indeed the RB8, the CT01 utilized the Renault RS27 2.4 L V8 engine, the very same engine was also being used by the black and gold Lotus branded team and the Williams team. It was a decent unit and while it wasn't the most powerful engine on the grid that season, it was perhaps the best in terms of its exhaust blowing capabilities. This was still the era of blown diffusers. Switching to the Williams Tunnel allowed the team to exploit the exhaust gas simulation capability there, and the team could finally try to exploit the Renault engine's ability to operate a blown diffuser. The Kater and blown diffuser was actually not really introduced until the British Grand Prix around the midpoint of the season. You can compare the blown diffuser version of the CTO1 here to the passive version here.

[00:09:20]However, if you read various reports of the 2012 season, lots of articles claim that blown diffusers were banned for that season. And while it is true that the FIA attempted to ban them, the reality is that they failed. The 2012 rules limited the exhaust exit positions on the bodywork. Low exhaust for blown diffusers were no longer allowed, and restrictions were placed on engine maps, which were needed to get that off throttle blowing effect working at its most efficient level. But realistically, none of this was really very effective.

[00:09:49]And as a result, teams sculpted their cars bodywork to get the same effect as a blown diffuser, just with relocated exhausts. So in reality, exhaust blown diffusers were not effectively banned until 2014 with the use of a single central tailpipe used on cars to this day. The car's development was also interrupted by a huge mid-season move with the team moving from its original base at the former Tom's GB and RTN Audi base in Hingham Norfolk where the Bentley Lemon cars were built as well as the gorgeous Audi R8C and we will have to get back to that to the old Arrows and Super Aguri facility in Lefield near Oxford, England. If you don't know UK geography, commuting from near the original factory in Norfolk to Oxford is simply not realistic, which meant many staff had to relocate their entire lives wasn't really ideal or they just had to leave the team. And that interruption in continuity probably had a detrimental to the team's function. The move though was made because Katherine believed it could go further at the more traditional and larger Leaffield facility which was better located for staff recruitment as it was in the heart of the so-called motorsport valley in England. The car's disrupted development though was probably a factor overall in its subpar performances that year. It never scored any points whatsoever, but it came within 6.2 seconds of a point at the final race of the 2012 season in Brazil.

[00:11:10]Not that it would have actually mattered if it had scored a point because the next team in front of it was so far in front it was too far to catch. But that result was crucial and it was worth millions in prize money to the team as it meant that it captured the critical 10th place in the constructor's championship from the Marissia team which prior to that point had a lock on 10th position in the championship as a result of a 12th place finish earlier in the season which was better than Katerum had managed. Charl Peak battled the caterum of Vitali Petrov right to the end of that race, but he missed out by 1.6 seconds. And that 1.6 seconds was probably worth upwards of 30 million to the Katerum team. In terms of its pace, the CTO1 never truly matched the midfield runners in 2012, but in qualifying, it was still substantially faster than either the Marusia or HRT teams. And on occasion, it even bested more established teams and drivers who may not have been having their best days. Hikova Linen in the CTO1 notably outqualified Michael Schumaca's Mercedes at the Bahrain Grand Prix and got cleanly through to Q2. Daniel Ricardo and Mark Weber suffered the same fate in Valencia. Essentially, anytime a team had a slight misstep in qualifying, the Katerums would capitalize. Overall though, HRT and Marissia couldn't match the pace of the Katerum, but Katerum couldn't match the pace of the rest of the field. Katerum built a total of three CTO1 chassis, of which chassis 1 was only used in testing at Migello and at the Duxford Airfield in the east of England, plus many rig tests that took part throughout the year at the Lola Technical Center. This chassis, as I say, was never raced and spent almost all of its year as a test piece, and it was sold off as a bare chassis at auction. Chassis 2 was used all season by Vitali Petrov in the races, and chassis 3 was used all season by Hikov Linen. Now, chassis 3 was retained by Katerum Cars and was stored for a long time at its factory near London. I believe it may still be at the company's current factory as well. While chassis 2, the one that was raced by Vitali Petrov, was then used by the team for R&D and ended up in a very poor condition, but later was restored into a rolling chassis and was on display in a private museum at one point. However, for the 2013 season, the team returned with a car which was launched as the CTO3.

[00:13:31]But as the first chassis numbers were CTO1 numbers four and five, I think it's fair to say that the CTO3 really should be considered as a continuation of the CTO1 and we will get back to that. Yeah, there's going to be a part two to this video. Katerum's F1 team had a very messy ending in 2014 and we will have to get back to that as well. While Katerum cars continues to this day, still producing its range of Katerum 7based products and development of the new project V sports car continues. The company today is owned by former Super GT GT300 driver Kazaw Takahashi who is behind the Mooncraft Shedan and GT300 Lot Evora and rumors of a Katerum project V GT300 car continue to this day. Though he has expressed no interest in returning Katerum to Formula 1. If you've enjoyed this very quick look at a pointless Formula 1 car, which actually won millions in prize money, then don't forget to hit like and subscribe as there's lots more like this to come. For now though, thanks for watching and I'll see you soon somewhere in the pit lane.

[00:14:45]Heat.

[00:15:08]Heat.

[00:15:21]Hey, hey, hey.