Now comes the dean of automotive writers, Karl Ludvigsen, to give us an accurate measure of the man's impact on the automotive world, Colin Chapman Inside the Innovator, from Haynes Publishing. Ludvigsen could have written a standard biography, having first met Chapman in 1958 at the Italian Grand Prix. However, not wanting to tread on ground already covered by Crombac, Lawrence, and others, Ludvigsen's 49th book, is more of a technical biography than a chronological one.

In his introduction (the book has a foreword by Emerson Fittipaldi) the author says that the thematic approach "allowed me to follow Colin Chapman through specific disciplines to see how he coped with them through the years, how his thinking evolved - or didn't - with time and experience. I found this adventure enlightening and hope you will too."



One aim of Ludvigsen was to look at Chapman's innovations and fairly assess whether or not credit was due. As a ruthless self-promoter, Chapman was not averse to offering a revisionist autobiography, so one can't exactly trust his accounts, and some of his critics or those who felt used by him may have shaded their own accounts in the other direction for their own reasons. Ludvigsen gets to the heart of the matter. He's unsparing when Chapman took credit for others' work and he's full of praise when Chapman was truly an innovator. He also makes the point that though Chapman may not have actually turned the first shovel of dirt for some of his groundbreaking innovations, it was Chapman who championed them and brought them to wide acceptance.



Ludvigsen's fairness extends to an unvarnished look at Chapman's failures, his undeveloped or aborted ideas, abandoned ideas that may yet show promise like active suspension, as well as his fruitful ideas that could have been even more successful.

At 400 large format pages, the book is encyclopaediac, lavishly illustrated with historical photos from Ludvigsen's own library as well as the historic Team Lotus archives at Ketteringham Hall.

Included are facsimiles of Chapman's own work lists, design briefs and component sketches, as well as a timeline of his life, plus an extensive bibliography and a fairly comprehensive index.



I'm a confirmed Lotus fan, having owned an Elan since the mid 1970s, this is hardly the first Lotus book that I've read, and on almost every page, nearly every paragraph, I learned something new about the company and the man.



He may not have been a saint, but the automotive world is the better for there having been a Colin Chapman. Colin Chapman Inside The Innovator is a masterful accounting of Chapman's influence on that world. In his introduction Ludvigsen expressed the hope that readers would find the book enlightening and in that task I'd say that he succeeded. As with his biographies of Ferdinand Porsche and Enzo Ferrari, this will become a standard reference on Chapman and his career.



By Ronnie Schreiber on June 23, 2010.

Publisher: Haynes Publishing

Status: Out of Print (No Stock)

Number of pages: 400

Colour images: 80

Black & white images: 245

Binding: HDB

Language: English

Origin: USA