Colin Chapman built his first car, based on an Austin 7, in a lock-up garage in Hornsey, North London in 1948, and formally founded the Lotus Engineering Company there in January 1952. Early cars were sold in component form to private racers, partly to sidestep UK purchase tax on complete vehicles.
Growing demand for both road and racing cars forced a move to a purpose-built factory on Delamare Road in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire in 1959. It was there that Team Lotus, the company’s motorsport division, won its first Formula One World Championship in 1963 with the revolutionary monocoque Type 25 and driver Jim Clark. By the mid-1960s, Lotus had outgrown Cheshunt too, and in 1966 moved to a converted WWII airfield, RAF Hethel, near Wymondham in Norfolk, where the company remains based today.
Team Lotus went on to win a total of seven F1 Constructors’ Championships and six Drivers’ Championships before withdrawing from the sport in 1994, twelve years after Chapman’s death in 1982. The road car business passed through several owners, including General Motors and Romano Artioli’s stewardship, before Malaysian firm Proton took control in the 1990s. Lotus is now owned by the Chinese manufacturer Geely.
