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In 1965, double Formula 1 World Champion Jim Clark scored a stunning victory in the world's richest motor race, the Indianapolis 500-Miles speedway classic, driving a Team Lotus 38 powered by a Ford V8 engine. The small British team had finished second in the 1963 '500', and would do so again in 1966. In 1968 Team Lotus attacked Indy with sophisticated four-wheel-drive gas-turbine powered cars which nearly won again – and the following year their turbocharged Ford V8 power and updated 4WD chassis were the most complex racing Lotuses ever built.
Those were fantastic years. The legendary Britons – Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Colin Chapman – enthused by America's Dan Gurney, took on the might of the Indianapolis establishment and rewrote motorsport history. In Team Lotus: The Indianapolis Years Andrew Ferguson, Team Lotus Competitions Manager during that spectacular period, tells in hitherto unpublished first-hand detail the inside story of the frenzied trans-Atlantic activity necessary to race, and to win, in the Indy '500'.
Supported by 1963-69 team documentation, much of which the author himself originated, this story is packed with anecdotes and often ribald recollections from the team members – the dedicated engineers, mechanics, fitters and fabricators who created some of the world's fastest single-seater racing cars for such glittering names as Jim Clark, Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, A.J.Foyt, Joe Leonard, and Bobby Marshman. Also revealed are the facts of Chapman's deals and duels with the Ford Motor Company, with Andy Granatelli of STP sponsorship fame, and with the United States Auto Club rule-makers.
In the 1980s and early '90s Andrew Ferguson ran Club Team Lotus, he was the team archivist, and produced a magazine for Lotus enthusiasts worldwide. Tragically he died just after completing Team Lotus: The Indianapolis Years. This magnificent work, meticulously researched and fascinatingly illustrated, is the definitive inside story of the Lotus years at Indianapolis. It is a fitting memorial to one of motorsport's finest raconteurs.
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