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A lot has been written about
Colin Chapman and his designs but there is a small but fairly
important bit that has never been put down on paper, maybe because
there were so few people involved at the time.
Colin was a one man design team
until he decided that a move into aircraft practice was required
and Mike Costin's aircraft connections were used to recruit helpers
form the aircraft world. Mike had known Peter Ross and myself
from De Havilland Technical School days and later in the 750
club building Austin 7 Specials so we were asked to help, as
was Mikes elder brother Frank. Frank was an aerodynamicist in
Flight Test at DH Chester factory while Peter and I were in the
Stress Office at De Havilland's main factory in Hatfield, although
I later moved into the design office on the Comet.
[For the clarification
of details apparently unknown to Mac McIntosh at the time, Peter
Ross adds:
In 1946 Peter
Ross was an Engineering Apprentice at the de Havilland Aircraft
Company, and had an Austin Seven. Another apprentice was Mike
Costin, and during the winter of 1947/48 they worked with Mike's
elder brother Frank to rebuild a 1933 glider called the Scud
I.
In 1948 Peter
joined the 750 Motor Club, which was the club devoted to all
things to do with Austin Sevens, and met Derek Wootton. Derek
soon recruited him as his passenger and mechanic in reliability
trials. These were known as mud plugging trials, as they involved
trying to climb steep muddy hills in winter. Another competitor
was Colin Chapman and his girl friend Hazel Williams driving
his Austin Seven Special, which we now call the Lotus Mk I.,
and as a result of this, and 750 Club meetings, Peter got to
know Colin.
Peter was living
with friends of his parents, Dr & Mrs John Currie in Cheshunt,
about ten miles from the de Havilland factory at Hatfield.This
was long before Lotus moved to Cheshunt. After a gap of two years
for National Service (conscription) in the Royal Air Force, Peter
went back in early 1952, to find that the Currie's son (and his
childhood friend) Adam, had moved back home after working in
Birmingham, and was keen to get into motor racing. Peter told
him about the Lotus Mark III, and how there were two chassis
that had never been finished, and Adam decided to buy one and
fit it with an 1172cc Ford engine to race in the new 1172 Formula
which was due to start in 1953.
Peter introduced
Adam to Colin Chapman, and they collected the rolling chassis
later that year, and finished it in time for Adam to race at
the last Silverstone race meeting of 1952.
At about this
time Michael Allen lost his enthusiasm for working with Colin,
and stopped working full time for the new Lotus Engineering Company.
They had just started production of the Lotus Mk VI, and Colin
was doing most of the work himself to modify customers components
to fit on the chassis frames made by the Progress Chassis Company
and the panel beaters Williams & Pritchard.
Peter thought
that Mike Costin might be just the chap to help Colin, and could
perhaps get a job with him as the company expanded, so he arranged
an introduction, and Mike started on 1st January, giving all
his spare time hours outside his regular job with de Havilland.
During the winter
of 1952/53 a lot of development work was done on Adam's Lotus
Mk IIIb, and Peter often drove it to work at Hatfield where it
caused a lot of interest, not the least from Mac McIntosh who
was by then in the de Havilland Design Drawing Office, and he
helped Adam by making a new bonnet top to cover the carburettor
and magneto. Mac was also into Austin Sevens, and joined Peter
and Mike Costin in evening welding classes in the fall of 1953.
Adam had by now
sold his Lotus IIIb, and Colin had promised him the second Mark
VIII streamlined car, to be fitted with the first of the new
Coventry Climax 1100cc engines.
Having helped
Adam in the past, it was natural that Peter would join Adam,
and Mike Costin as part of the team which built the first Mk.VIII
Lotus Dec 1953-April 1954. Peter did some stress calculations
on the new frame, showed them to Mac, and he got hooked into
the team as well.
Frank Costin
had got involved because Mike Costin had sent him a model of
the proposed streamlined body made by Dave Kelsey, one of the
Progress Chassis partners, and Mike reckoned it was no good,
and his brother could do better. Frank modified it completely,
sold the idea to Colin, and was hooked into the team as well.
Colin now had all his aircraft industry people, and the rest
of the story is as told by Mac.]
The team soon clicked into place,
Frank produced the profiles for the panel beaters, Peter concentrated
on the suspension, brake, clutch, rear axle and transmission
drawings, and I did the chassis drawings and strength calculations.
I had trained as an aircraft
designer at DH and was expected to do my own stressing and aerodynamics
so that the design was nearly there when the stress office did
the final calculations. It was a bit of a culture shock to find
that people designed cars with no knowledge of loadings, life,
or stress, equally that design was done on the car as it was
built. We got through the Mk VIII with a lot of very speculative
calcs. and quite a bit of re-making. When the car was running
and things broke the learning curve got really steep as we worked
back from what the stress must have been to break, to what the
loads must have been to create that stress. The design was done
largely at Hornsey but the calculations were done in my days
at Hatfield.
About this time I got hold of
a paper on vehicle suspension dynamics by Maurice Olley of Vauxhalls,
he was the Albert Einstein of car suspension, so this was gold
dust. Colin always swore by Harry Ricardo's book on 'the High
Speed Internal Combustion Engine' and Alley was soon joining
Ricardo as essential reading. While the Mk VIII was being raced
in the Summer we started thinking about the Mk IX with design
sessions on the board in the corner of Colin's lounge while detail
schemes and calculations on stresses and suspension were done
by Colin and I during the week.
The Approach
Colin and I had a similar approach
to design and we soon cooked up an approach to design which stood
us in good stead for the rest of our design careers. It was a
very light hearted approach with a lot of larking about, but
it worked and we developed quite a few techniques, usually with
facetious titles from Frank. Colin told me that when he and Frank
were doing the Vanwall, the Vanwall design team eyed them with
a great deal of suspicion as they thought they were mad.
The three main principles were:
'What are we really trying to do,' 'Put a number to it,' and
'the Bloody Sillies.'
The first was Colin's perpetual
question as he was never happy until he had got down to the real
root of a problem, until we had established that, we couldn't
really make any headway.The second was what I had drilled into
me at DH because if you can't put numbers to things, you don't
understand them. The third was typical Frank and boiled down
to never saying 'Don't be Bloody Silly!' so nobody was inhibited
and afraid to come up with a suggestion. This freedom led to
some riotous sessions but a hell of a lot of very good ideas.
From what I hear of Cosworth, the principle has applied equally
effectively in their design sessions.
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