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TG's mission to find the coolest plane in motorsport history

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TG's mission to find the coolest plane in motorsport history | Top Gear

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TG's mission to find the coolest plane in motorsport history

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TG's mission to find the coolest plane in motorsport history

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It's not just one of the greatest motoring promo images of all time. It's the sheer 1970s-ness that's off the corduroy scale. The caramel brown Esprit. The cocoa-not-Coco suit. Those sideburns. A beaming Colin Chapman perches triumphantly on the wedge bonnet of his company’s flagship sports car. It’s just been immortalised as James Bond’s submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me. His team is the reigning Formula One world champion, winning five constructor titles in the past decade. Lotus is flying high. Literally. Chapman’s treated himself to a new plane and its tail number is a joke.

G-PRIX is a Cessna 414A ‘Chancellor’ – the latest model from the American light aircraft giant. Each wing carries a 345bhp six-cylinder engine, ready to power it to a maximum altitude of 30,800ft. It’ll carry seven and cruise at 270 miles per hour, but it does its best work standing still. Despite its nose-to-tail black paintjob adding unnecessary weight and making the aircraft rather stuffy inside on sunny days (there’s a reason almost all commercial aircraft are white) Chapman is never one to miss a publicity opportunity. Heck, this is the man who brought sponsorship liveries to motor racing. His new corporate runabout is decked out in the gold pinstriped John Player Special livery, with a subtle union jack aft of the pilot’s side window, and the owner’s name scripted along the fuselage.

The photo isn’t just a rare glimmer of sub-zero cool from the decade that taste forgot. It’s also poignant, because it represents Chapman’s peak. Lotus would never win another F1 world title. In four years, the brilliant engineer would suffer a fatal heart attack, embroiled in legal controversy surrounding the demise of the doomed DeLorean.

Photography: Huckleberry Mountain

You wouldn’t have blamed regular F1 attendees for being secretly relieved when Chapman passed at theageofjust54,becausetheone-timeRAFtrainee wasn’t just a menace on track. He was also a maverick in the air, infamous for indulging in the odd ‘low pass’ to the delight of fans and ire of officials. Landing in a Brands Hatch field in the mid- 1960s, his twin-engined Piper’s landing gear snagged a rabbit hole and ripped clean off. Chapman was so enraged about the damage he stormed off to find someone to shout at about the state of the grass... and forgot to switch off the howling engines. Or help his wife Hazel disembark the stricken plane.

He even came a cropper at the company’s Norfolk headquarters. According to Lotus employees of the time, Chapman impatiently taxied one of his planes into the Hethel hangar ambitiously fast. Unable to stop, it expensively crashed into the back wall. To stop this from happening again, the engineering graduate had timber sleepers bolted to the floor to chock the main landing gear. Nice idea – until he once again arrived in a hurry. The plane’s wheels hit the sleepers. The aircraft lurched forward, its tail struck the ceiling and the propellers clattered the floor. Cue another hefty bill.

It’s not exactly a shock that a businessman who obsessed over lightness, efficiency and speed in his day job was also an aircraft fanatic. G-PRIX was the last in a line of aircraft the Lotus founder had at his disposal, but leading right up to his untimely death Chapman had plans to revolutionise the world of private air travel. He was working on a spindly single engine twin-seater called the Lotus MicroLight which drove the propeller from the camshaft, ingeniously dispensing with a reduction gear. The airframe was based around an American design – the Rutan 97M – improved with lashings of outside the box British thinking.

Chapman planned to put the craft into production and offer it as a flagship product line alongside Lotus cars. The prototype made its first successful test flight on 16 December 1982 – the very same day Chapman died. Without his inspiration, the project floundered.

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And that would be the end of the tale of Lotus and aircraft... until I heard that G-PRIX hadn’t been sold off for scrap with the family silver or buried in a Norfolk turnip field decades ago. Apparently the plane had found its way to America, repainted red and white, its tail number changed to N-414BW, and was serving out its days as someone’s desert runabout. At a flight school, even. There was allegedly interest from Europe to repatriate it, but also scepticism. Was the aircraft genuinely the ex- Lotus example? The trail went cold again.

It turns out the good guys in this story are the Germans. Out of nowhere, an email pinged off to the boss of Dortmund classic racing garage Britec Motorsport offered a lead. The Chancellor was being looked after at a nondescript airfield an hour east of Munich. Better yet, while everything had gone quiet, it’d been meticulously restored to its heyday livery. I had to see it.

Transport? A modern day Lotus bizjet. The new Emeya: the electric saloon-y coupe-ish liftback lozenge that takes the twin motor package and cabin from the Eletre SUV and shoves it right down the hip-high Porsche Taycan’s throat. It undercuts the Porsche on price, beats it on power, space and equipment, and looks more exotic than anything in the Tesla Model S ballpark, Audi e-tron GT aside.

It’s an enormous barge, over five metres long, two wide but despite the blacked out roof visually lowering the car onto its 21-inch rims, it’s taller than you’d expect. Although they’ve shaved the battery a smidge from the SUV’s 109kWh slab to 102kWh (Lotus says range shortfall is offset by slipperier aero), you don’t sit sports car low, like in the scalloped innards of the Taycan or the e-tron. You’re lofted up towards crossover height in your 603bhp sedan chair, which feels alien among autobahnstormers but is probably a canny call among the new money entrepreneurs of Shanghai and Wuhan where this car needs to succeed.

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This isn’t a Lotus as Chapman would’ve recognised it – or any of us – because it doesn’t smell of fibreglass (or petrol, obviously), it’s got Rolls-Royce rear legroom acreage and the touchscreen is snappier than anything this side of a Cybertruck’s. But that hasn’t stopped Lotus laying on the heritage with a trowel. I count 13 ACBC logos – the intertwined initials of Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman – scattered around the Emeya. And that’s if you don’t count the meticulously rendered ones on the interactive avatar that inhabits the 15-inch megascreen.

It’s a stunning object rich in material quality, but I struggle to get along with the Emeya. I’m lucky photographer Huck declined an invitation to recline in the back and rode up front, so he can delve into the display’s sub-menus. As usual, cameras make for crap door mirrors, and though the car’s responsive enough, it’s too heavy and inert to form a bond with in a couple of hours. I quietly appreciate its probing massage seats and unflappable ride, not that the glassy roads out of Munich present the challenge that the old fenland proving grounds once did.

We sidle up to the gates of the Eggenfelden airfield in the early evening, met by hangar owner and aircraft inspector Miche Ender. “Ugh, it’s electric?” he remarks gruffly. Car duly assessed, he turns and leads us to a sleek black bird among the ubiquitous white kites. Basking in the remnants of the day’s heatwave is G-PRIX, tyres pumped, inky paintwork shimmering. Back to her JPS best.

Miche is mildly amused I think it’s a celebrity. “It’s just an old plane?” he shrugs. I enquire how it flies. “It’s... pretty good. The avionics date it.” I nod in agreement and make a mental note to Google ‘avionics’ later. How original is the aircraft? “The engines and airframe is all original,” grunts another matter of fact answer. “Corrosion is the big killer of airframes though we don’t have to worry about that here. But to keep it certified and flying, we have to replace and modernise the avionics.” Damn.

The cabin is a time capsule delight. Executive leather chairs, polished walnut veneer, foldout cupholders: the works.

Climbing aboard on what feels like a criminally fragile drop-down step, the cabin is a time capsule delight. Executive leather chairs, polished walnut veneer, foldout cupholders: the works. It’s a tiny environment you’d struggle to exit without a hunch, but I grin at the thought of the atmosphere aboard while returning home from another victorious race meeting. The champagne, the cigar smoke, and probably an ingenious idea or two for next year’s car being sketched out on a pressed napkin. No sleep ’til Norfolk.

A pilot friend warns me later that’s a romanticised perspective. “Light twin-engines are a proper Seventies bring your A-game situation. One day an engine will fail at takeoff and it’ll just roll you headfirst into the runway. But there’s something kind of brawny about them.”

I hadn’t expected to see G-PRIX move under its own power, but Miche is amused the 690bhp aircraft is more powerful than our state of the art EV. He proposes a fast taxi demo.

And that’s how I come to be cruising down the centre of the Eggenfelden runway, with the actual ex-Chapman Cessna revving up its props and chasing me down. Quite a sight in the mirror. Makes for one heck of a picture, I hope you’ll agree. But only the second best photo this aircraft ever starred in.

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It's not just one of the greatest motoring promo images of all time. It's the sheer 1970s-ness that's off the corduroy scale. The caramel brown Esprit. The cocoa-not-Coco suit. Those sideburns. A beaming Colin Chapman perches triumphantly on the wedge bonnet of his company’s flagship sports car. It’s just been immortalised as James Bond’s submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me. His team is the reigning Formula One world champion, winning five constructor titles in the past decade. Lotus is flying high. Literally. Chapman’s treated himself to a new plane and its tail number is a joke.

G-PRIX is a Cessna 414A ‘Chancellor’ – the latest model from the American light aircraft giant. Each wing carries a 345bhp six-cylinder engine, ready to power it to a maximum altitude of 30,800ft. It’ll carry seven and cruise at 270 miles per hour, but it does its best work standing still. Despite its nose-to-tail black paintjob adding unnecessary weight and making the aircraft rather stuffy inside on sunny days (there’s a reason almost all commercial aircraft are white) Chapman is never one to miss a publicity opportunity. Heck, this is the man who brought sponsorship liveries to motor racing. His new corporate runabout is decked out in the gold pinstriped John Player Special livery, with a subtle union jack aft of the pilot’s side window, and the owner’s name scripted along the fuselage.

The photo isn’t just a rare glimmer of sub-zero cool from the decade that taste forgot. It’s also poignant, because it represents Chapman’s peak. Lotus would never win another F1 world title. In four years, the brilliant engineer would suffer a fatal heart attack, embroiled in legal controversy surrounding the demise of the doomed DeLorean.

Photography: Huckleberry Mountain

You wouldn’t have blamed regular F1 attendees for being secretly relieved when Chapman passed at theageofjust54,becausetheone-timeRAFtrainee wasn’t just a menace on track. He was also a maverick in the air, infamous for indulging in the odd ‘low pass’ to the delight of fans and ire of officials. Landing in a Brands Hatch field in the mid- 1960s, his twin-engined Piper’s landing gear snagged a rabbit hole and ripped clean off. Chapman was so enraged about the damage he stormed off to find someone to shout at about the state of the grass... and forgot to switch off the howling engines. Or help his wife Hazel disembark the stricken plane.

He even came a cropper at the company’s Norfolk headquarters. According to Lotus employees of the time, Chapman impatiently taxied one of his planes into the Hethel hangar ambitiously fast. Unable to stop, it expensively crashed into the back wall. To stop this from happening again, the engineering graduate had timber sleepers bolted to the floor to chock the main landing gear. Nice idea – until he once again arrived in a hurry. The plane’s wheels hit the sleepers. The aircraft lurched forward, its tail struck the ceiling and the propellers clattered the floor. Cue another hefty bill.

It’s not exactly a shock that a businessman who obsessed over lightness, efficiency and speed in his day job was also an aircraft fanatic. G-PRIX was the last in a line of aircraft the Lotus founder had at his disposal, but leading right up to his untimely death Chapman had plans to revolutionise the world of private air travel. He was working on a spindly single engine twin-seater called the Lotus MicroLight which drove the propeller from the camshaft, ingeniously dispensing with a reduction gear. The airframe was based around an American design – the Rutan 97M – improved with lashings of outside the box British thinking.

Chapman planned to put the craft into production and offer it as a flagship product line alongside Lotus cars. The prototype made its first successful test flight on 16 December 1982 – the very same day Chapman died. Without his inspiration, the project floundered.

And that would be the end of the tale of Lotus and aircraft... until I heard that G-PRIX hadn’t been sold off for scrap with the family silver or buried in a Norfolk turnip field decades ago. Apparently the plane had found its way to America, repainted red and white, its tail number changed to N-414BW, and was serving out its days as someone’s desert runabout. At a flight school, even. There was allegedly interest from Europe to repatriate it, but also scepticism. Was the aircraft genuinely the ex- Lotus example? The trail went cold again.

It turns out the good guys in this story are the Germans. Out of nowhere, an email pinged off to the boss of Dortmund classic racing garage Britec Motorsport offered a lead. The Chancellor was being looked after at a nondescript airfield an hour east of Munich. Better yet, while everything had gone quiet, it’d been meticulously restored to its heyday livery. I had to see it.

Transport? A modern day Lotus bizjet. The new Emeya: the electric saloon-y coupe-ish liftback lozenge that takes the twin motor package and cabin from the Eletre SUV and shoves it right down the hip-high Porsche Taycan’s throat. It undercuts the Porsche on price, beats it on power, space and equipment, and looks more exotic than anything in the Tesla Model S ballpark, Audi e-tron GT aside.

It’s an enormous barge, over five metres long, two wide but despite the blacked out roof visually lowering the car onto its 21-inch rims, it’s taller than you’d expect. Although they’ve shaved the battery a smidge from the SUV’s 109kWh slab to 102kWh (Lotus says range shortfall is offset by slipperier aero), you don’t sit sports car low, like in the scalloped innards of the Taycan or the e-tron. You’re lofted up towards crossover height in your 603bhp sedan chair, which feels alien among autobahnstormers but is probably a canny call among the new money entrepreneurs of Shanghai and Wuhan where this car needs to succeed.

This isn’t a Lotus as Chapman would’ve recognised it – or any of us – because it doesn’t smell of fibreglass (or petrol, obviously), it’s got Rolls-Royce rear legroom acreage and the touchscreen is snappier than anything this side of a Cybertruck’s. But that hasn’t stopped Lotus laying on the heritage with a trowel. I count 13 ACBC logos – the intertwined initials of Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman – scattered around the Emeya. And that’s if you don’t count the meticulously rendered ones on the interactive avatar that inhabits the 15-inch megascreen.

It’s a stunning object rich in material quality, but I struggle to get along with the Emeya. I’m lucky photographer Huck declined an invitation to recline in the back and rode up front, so he can delve into the display’s sub-menus. As usual, cameras make for crap door mirrors, and though the car’s responsive enough, it’s too heavy and inert to form a bond with in a couple of hours. I quietly appreciate its probing massage seats and unflappable ride, not that the glassy roads out of Munich present the challenge that the old fenland proving grounds once did.

We sidle up to the gates of the Eggenfelden airfield in the early evening, met by hangar owner and aircraft inspector Miche Ender. “Ugh, it’s electric?” he remarks gruffly. Car duly assessed, he turns and leads us to a sleek black bird among the ubiquitous white kites. Basking in the remnants of the day’s heatwave is G-PRIX, tyres pumped, inky paintwork shimmering. Back to her JPS best.

Miche is mildly amused I think it’s a celebrity. “It’s just an old plane?” he shrugs. I enquire how it flies. “It’s... pretty good. The avionics date it.” I nod in agreement and make a mental note to Google ‘avionics’ later. How original is the aircraft? “The engines and airframe is all original,” grunts another matter of fact answer. “Corrosion is the big killer of airframes though we don’t have to worry about that here. But to keep it certified and flying, we have to replace and modernise the avionics.” Damn.

The cabin is a time capsule delight. Executive leather chairs, polished walnut veneer, foldout cupholders: the works.

Climbing aboard on what feels like a criminally fragile drop-down step, the cabin is a time capsule delight. Executive leather chairs, polished walnut veneer, foldout cupholders: the works. It’s a tiny environment you’d struggle to exit without a hunch, but I grin at the thought of the atmosphere aboard while returning home from another victorious race meeting. The champagne, the cigar smoke, and probably an ingenious idea or two for next year’s car being sketched out on a pressed napkin. No sleep ’til Norfolk.

A pilot friend warns me later that’s a romanticised perspective. “Light twin-engines are a proper Seventies bring your A-game situation. One day an engine will fail at takeoff and it’ll just roll you headfirst into the runway. But there’s something kind of brawny about them.”

I hadn’t expected to see G-PRIX move under its own power, but Miche is amused the 690bhp aircraft is more powerful than our state of the art EV. He proposes a fast taxi demo.

And that’s how I come to be cruising down the centre of the Eggenfelden runway, with the actual ex-Chapman Cessna revving up its props and chasing me down. Quite a sight in the mirror. Makes for one heck of a picture, I hope you’ll agree. But only the second best photo this aircraft ever starred in.

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Colin Chapman once bought a Cessna 414A and gave it the full JPS treatment. 45 years later... we've found it