The Real Influencers: Colin Chapman

There’s a strong case to be made that Colin Chapman’s influence on today’s car industry is actually quite limited. His famous design philosophy, ‘simplify, then add lightness’, won over a few engineering legends, including Gordon Murray, and helped to ensure that Murray’s McLaren F1 and GMA T.50 were stand-out special supercars. And it is true that Chapman’s own ideas that turned up in his Lotus cars also influenced a host of other great sporting models, none more commercially successful than the Mazda MX-5.

Yet the world’s mainstream motor industry engineers, while usually sympathetic to Chapman’s weight-paring ideal, have historically turned their backs on the Lotus founder’s philosophy and walked in the diametrically opposed direction. Cars have not become simpler and lighter. On the contrary, they’ve become heavier and more complicated. And massively so.

Yet here he is, deservedly one of our ‘Real Influencers’.