High hopes for the new Lotus F1 team

Just five months after being granted a position in Formula One by the sport’s governing body, the FIA, Lotus Racing unveiled its 2010 challengers last week at a ceremony in London.

For the new team, it has been something of a rush to get everything in place and they fully expect a tough start to the season in Bahrain, but remain confident that with their structures now in place, gains can be made throughout their debut season.

"I’m not going to profess to know where we’re going to be,” said team principal Tony Fernandes. “My role is to keep everyone motivated and to provide energy to the team. My first target is to hope we finish the race in Bahrain. We all want to be winners; we all want to be at the front. But we need to be real. The fact that we have put the car together in five months is already a massive victory and we’ll build from there. Great teams all start from the bottom, let’s see where we end up.

"We’ve got two fantastic drivers that would challenge any team,” Fernandes continued. “It shows our determination to be the very best. We’re not going to get there straight away, but the fact we’ve done all this in five months shows we will be a challenger in the not too distant future. We don’t take this name lightly and we’re not here to be an also-ran. We hope to be up there and to regain the wonderful history Lotus has had and to really put Lotus back at its rightful position. That’s our ultimate goal.”

The construction of the new T127 challenger, as well as the team infrastructure itself has been a huge task for veteran designer Mike Gascoyne. Interestingly he points out that design and build of the chassis itself was relatively straight forward, but getting the team together was the real challenge.

"It’s been a huge job and not one that we underestimated but I think everyone looks at the design of the car as the critical part - which it is - but that was the one thing we were under control with because I concentrated on that when I was doing the FIA entry in May,” Gascoyne said. "What I personally underestimated is everything else... interviewing everyone to get 220 people on board. Initially, when we were four people, we could not go and interview 220 people, you physically can’t do it. You have to get people in and then it snowballs. So it’s the rest of the job rather than just the car which has been the biggest challenge."

"We took the design team on in Cologne,” Gascoyne continued. “My company MGI did that, but that based around three or four key people I had worked with at Toyota, plus a lot of key contractors. That was to get a team of experienced team together but also to allow us to employ full time design staff here in Norfolk.

"If we got two cars to the finish in Bahrain I would be happy. If we do that, we may not be too far off scoring a point. So let’s get two cars to the finish."