Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean scored a double podium for Lotus at this year's Bahrain Grand Prix. It was the first podium for a car under that moniker since Nelson Piquet in Australia, 1988. In view of the resurgent form of Team Lotus, Jem Ruggera takes a look back at the early years of one of the greatest outfits ever to compete in F1.
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Of
all the evocative sights and sounds that constituted Formula 1 racing
in the 1960's, there are few that spring more quickly to mind than
the sight of a young Scottish driver named Jim Clark silkily
threading an elegant green Lotus 25 along the wet, foggy straights
and bends of the epic Spa-Francorchamps circuit,
or racing from a lap down at flat-out Monza in 1967 to come within a
corner of the greatest comeback drive in history, or winning the
German Grand Prix at the deadly Nordschleife from pole, while setting
the fastest lap of the race, and leading every lap – to win the
championship by early August, a record that wouldn't be broken for
another 37 years.