Power About Lola
Lola Racing Cars (also Lola Cars International) is a racing car engineering company founded in 1961 by Eric Broadley and based in Huntingdon, England. Lola started by building small front-engined sports cars, and branched out into Formula Junior cars before diversifying into one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of racing cars in the world.
Lola is one of the best-known names in automobile racing. A subsidiary of Lola is the rowing boat manufacturer Lola Aylings. Lola was acquired by Martin Birrane in 1998 after the unsuccessful Lola MasterCard attempt at Formula 1.
Lola has recently announced that it is going ahead with a programme to build a car to the 2008 Formula One rules, although no obvious customer for this exists.
Sports Cars
Early Days - the 1960s
Lola was one of the top chassis suppliers in sports car racing in the 1960s. After his small front-engined sports cars and various single-seaters, Broadley designed a Lola coupe fitted with the Ford V8 engine. Ford took a keen interest in this and paid Broadley to put the company on hold for two years and merge his ideas with Roy Lunn's work, giving rise to the Ford GT40. Broadley managed to release himself from this contract after a year and started developing his own cars again, starting off in sports cars with the Lola T70 and its successors (T16x, T22x) which were used successfully all over the world from the World Endurance Championship to the CanAm series, until 1973. Recently, Lola announced that a new batch of T70 coupés, to the original specifications, will be released. These will be homologated for historic racing and there is talk of a one-make series for the cars.
