Cosworth has had an even rockier past: like many racing engines, Cosworth sold their engines as OEM kit - their main customer was Ford. The company went through a succession of owners including United Engineering Industries which was taken over by the bizarre growth of Carlton Communications - a London local TV broadcaster that became a vehicle for a ridiculously diverse range of takeovers.
Carlton sold Cosworth to arms manufacturer Vickers (they make tanks but have lost their name and are now part of BAe) during which time it developed some clever patents for aluminium processes to help in high-stress engines. Vickers later sold it to VW. VW didn't know what to do with the racing bit (ha, Audi would kill for it now - although the casting division was retained and formed the basis of the new series of Audi engines that have brought the marque back from dullsville) and back-to-back sold the racing division to Ford which seemed both logical and something of a homecoming.
But Ford's foray into F1 with cars branded - oddly - as Jaguar was a bit of a disaster. The company had been split again into "Racing" and "powertrains." The ally block business was sold off by VW and the purchasers of that bought the power train bit from Ford. That's not where our interest lies except as a footnote: the interesting thing is what happened to "Racing."
Ford sold the F1 team - and Cosworth racing - to the owners of "the other" open wheel race series in the USA - Champ Cars, formerly CART. Champ Cars ran, almost always, on proper racing circuits - or airfields. So who were the owners? Gerald Forsythe (who?) and Kevin Kalkhoven. Yes, the one that is the less famous half of KV Racing with Jimmy Vasser.
The CART / Champ Car series was a breakaway series and because Americans like closed round-the-walls racing, the attempt to build a race series similar to the rest of the world failed.
In 2003, CART went broke: a buyout by Kalkhoven and others brought it back with all cars running Cosworth engines after Ford sold out in 2004 and after a couple of name-changes it became Champ Car. But in 2008, the series collapsed after just one event and entered into a shot-gun marriage with IRL. One of the teams that went over to IRL was the team now known as KV Racing.
So, as in F1 Cosworth has come back after a four year hiatus, so it is heading back to the USA where it has not been in single seat racing since 2006: IndyCar has been, in essence, a one-make series with chassis contracts with Dallara and engines supplied by Honda. The engine contract expired at the end of last season. The chassis contract, however, still has a year to go.
Dallara have built the chassis for the Campos / HRT F1 team: in fact when the FIA originally listed its 2010 teams, one of them was Campos Dallara. Now the HRT team, its engines ... are from Cosworth.
Although Lotus is tight lipped, it seems probable that the chassis is a Dallara, the same as all the others on the grid, but Lotus will have some freedom in relation to set up, suspension and aero. Last month, another of those new hires at the top of Lotus, Claudio Berro, director of motorsport, told Motorsport News "The Indycar programme is a big project and we need to join with an existing team to begin with, because that is the easiest way in terms of logistics." Berro, like Bahar, is a former Ferrari man, but via Fiat's racing division and a foray with the ill-fated Speedcar Series. When he joined Lotus three months ago, he said "Lotus has a peerless motorsport heritage, not just in Formula One, but we have also won in sportscar racing, saloon car racing, world rally championships, Le Mans and the Indy 500. There is no other car company in the world which can lay claim to so many accolades and championships in such a wide variety of motorsport fields, and I am looking forward to re-introducing Lotus to high level motorsport to not only compete and win but also to demonstrate the shared technology between Lotus sportscars and future racing cars."
Like Lotus, Cosworth has not been out of racing: it has a thriving race electronic business (which it has converted into aerospace and alternative fuels expertise) and Cosworth is providing the electronics pack for the BLOODHOUND SSC - a UK-based assault on the 1000 mph land speed record. That's the successor to the Thrust SSC which holds the current Land Speed record. One of the engineers on that car was a chap called Jeremy Bliss who had been an engineer at Lotus working on active suspension and, because the Active Suspension project at Lotus was dead, moved to Thrust SSC which needed the clever suspension.
Thrust SSC was driven by Andy Green who, despite his land speed records had never entered a motor race. Last June he entered a Lotus Elise, painted in BLOODHOUND SSC colours in a race at Snetterton, in the Lotus festival. Green is a (now former) RAF jet fighter pilot. Snetterton is a converted redundant fighter airfield in Norfolk, England - in the deep green grass and mustard fields that give rise to the Lotus colour scheme - just down the road from the factory that Lotus have set up their F1 camp and Hethel, the spiritual home of all things Lotus.
See: we told you it was convoluted. But at least we managed to join all the dots.
Graphic: rendering courtesy Lotus
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