This month the rather magnificent Lotus 80 steals the show. Taken by Wolfgang Mauser at the Nurburgring’s AVD OldTimer GP in 2013, it’s an usually good shot of an extremely rare car. Even back in its day the ground-breaking, ground-effect car only entered a total of 3 races and completed just one. Mario Andretti managed to bring it home for a remarkable podium place in the 1979 Spanish Grand Prix – no mean feat in a car so experimental that team-mate Carlos Reutemann refused to drive it! The idea was to maximize under body ground-effect by running skirts along the whole length of the car. The theory was sound but it proved tricky and inconsistent in practice and was abandoned for the rest of the season as Team Lotus returned to running the Champsionship winning Lotus 79.
Our thanks to Wolfgang for his permission to use the shot.
To download it for your desktop, smartphone or tablet – simply click the thumbnail below, then, once opened, right click and ‘save as’.
The Old Timer GP looks like a fantastic annual event at the Nurburgring, this year it falls on the 11-13th August, you can find out more here.
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