S3 E6: Lola's disastrous 1997 F1 team

Lola's brief attempt at joining the F1 grid in 1997 is one of the most famous failures in recent F1 history. In this episode of Bring Back V10s, Sam Smith and Edd Straw join Glenn Freeman to revisit how this famous British car constructor got things so badly wrong when it finally tried to enter its own team.

We look back at Lola's long-running ambition to enter F1 itself after building cars for other teams in the past, and why it kept stretching its own deadline for an entry for 1997. It's well known that title sponsor MasterCard forced the team to enter at the last minute - but why was the credit card company so insistent that it had to be '97 rather than Lola's preferred path to an entry in '98? There's also the stories of why the car was so bad, what it felt like to drive, why Lola thought it could design its own V10 engine on a fraction of the budget spent by major manufacturers, what happened when the T97/30 was finally put in a windtunnel, the drastic changes Lola considered making during the embarrassing Australian GP weekend, and how alterations were made for the second race of the year that would have made the car even slower if the team hadn't closed just before that Brazilian GP weekend.

ASK US ANYTHING: Submit your question for our series finale about anything to do with F1 from 1989-2005 by either using #BringBackV10s or leaving us a 5-star podcast review!

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.