LOLA T-70. The Lola T70 coupe was a fine chassis in search of a good strong engine. It started its L

The Lola T70 coupe was a fine chassis in search of a good strong engine. It started its Le Mans career with the Aston Martin V8: a disaster. Thereafter came variations on the Chevrolet V8 theme, without success. Gordon Jones looks at the T70 Le Mans cars and finds much to be admired in their chassis engineering.

As an exercise to win Le Mans, the Lola-Aston Martin project was an unmitigated disaster. It brought no kudos to any of the involved parties. It did nothing for the Lola and Aston Martin names that both cars should fail miserably on their much her-alded Le Mans outing. It did nothing for the people involved. For Eric Broadley of Lola, it meant much time and effort expended for nil return. For John Surtees as the develop-ment and race driver, a wasted six months. For Tadek Marek, the talented Aston Martin engine designer, the creation that was to have been his 'magnum opus' just before retirement, became his crucifix. The engine had to be totally redesigned, thereby losing Aston Martin two years before the release of the first DBSV8, and probably therefore contributed to the demise of the David Brown Aston Martin era. If any good came from the debacle, one can only say that the redesigned V8 became the backbone of Aston Martin power for the next decade. The project had started back in the early 1960's. Aston Martin knew that its six cylinder engine was reaching the limits of development. Tadek Marek, a brilliant Polish engineer and winner of the 1939 Polish Grand Prix, had escaped to Britain in 1941, and John Wyer, as the new General Manager at Aston's, had poached him from the British Motor Corporation. Marek de-signed a brand new V8 engine; a 90 degree vee of 96mm bore x 83mm stroke giving 4806cc, with chain driven double overhead camshafts and four twin choke Weber car-burettors. The whole engine was cast from aluminium alloy; block, crankcase, sump, heads, camshaft covers and inlet mani-folds. The cylinder bores had top seated wet liners in cast iron, and the five main bearing caps were in steel. With Aston Martin's penchant for race development, the new V8 engine was to have run in the 1963 Le Mans.

A new development Project car had been de-signed, the DP215, but with the V8 not race ready, the Marque ran an enlarged version of the six cylinder engine and achieved an incredible 198.6 mph on the Mulsanne straight during practice. After Le Mans, an internal economy drive closed down the Experimental and the Racing departments and the V8 development was shelved. The project had to be resurrected in 1966, since shoehorning the enlarged six cylinder en-gines into the DB4 was becoming ex-tremely difficult. The V8 engine was given a new develop-ment project number, DP218, and the bore was enlarged from 96mm to 98mm, giving a swept volume of 5008cc, not 5064cc as reported in most contemporary articles. Aston, true to its principles, still wished to test the new V8 in racing. Eric Broadley's 1963 Lola coupe with V8 power, and his subsequent Ford GT40 creation had im-pressed many people, especially John Wyer. Since then, the 1965 Lola T70 spyder had acquitted itself well, and Aston Martin was just one of many who ap-proached Broadley and suggested that he produce a new coupe. Aston Martin wanted to test the new V8 at the most prestigious race in the book, Le Mans. Success at Le Mans brings fat order books, and Aston Martin had been sliding backwards since its 1959 Le Mans wins. A deal was struck. A Lola coupe, the Aston Martin V8 engine, and arguably the best development driver of the era to form Lola Racing to run the new car at Le Mans 1967. The second 1966 works Lola T70 MKII spyder was given to Aston Martin as a development hack. The Aston engine sat nicely in the T70 chassis, with minimal alteration to the rear pontoon chassis members. The V8 engine came through the test with flying colours, and Aston Mar-tin returned the T70 spyder to Team Surtees in August to await the coupe.

The first coupe came off the production line on 2 November 1966. The Lola T70 GT had to be offered for sale by Lola with V8 Chevrolet engines as standard, or Ford and Aston Martin V8s as options. Therefore John Surtees started chassis development at Goodwood with a 5.5 litre V8 Chevrolet prepared by Los Angeles tuner Ryan Falconer. These engines were producing around 460 bhp and were therefore compa-rable to the 450bhp that Aston was claiming with its V8 on carburetters. After the Racing Car Show in early Janu-ary 1967, the car was fitted with the Aston Martin engine. A test programme at Good-wood in February, which included twelve and fourteen hour endurance runs, was deemed successful, and the Le Mans proj-ect was given the green light. The Aston engine was rather heavy and the engineers aimed to develop a fuel injection version to provide more horse power. The pro-gramme was first the Le Mans Test Week-end for carburetter and fuel injection back to back testing, a proving race at the Nur-burgring 1000 kms, then a two car assault on Le Mans. Eric Broadley had designed the Lola 170 MK III as a development of the MKII spyder; lighter chassis, improved suspension, bet-ter brakes, an improved gear linkage, driver cooling, ease of maintenance, and a revo-lutionary feature - one chassis that could be either spyder or GT coupe. The chassis was a light alloy and sheet steel welded and riveted monocoque, common today, but highly original when the first T70 spyder was built. The front sus-pension was hung on a box section exten-sion, with the rear suspension and transaxle on twin box sections on either side of the engine. Torsional rigidity was provided by light alloy transverse bulk-heads. The suspension was by double wishbones on self-aligning roller bearing and ball joints with telescopic shock ab-sorbers and co-axial coil springs. The front wishbones were, again by cur-rent design, very conventional. Top links were short adjustable machined steel bar with the same for the bottom trailing link, but using a fabricated arm for the main lower arm. The coil spring damper unit was fixed to the top of the front transverse bulkhead and acted on this lower arm, as did the high mounted anti-roll bar. Steering was by stock BMC rack and pinion set high behind the front axle and linked to rear facing steering arms. The very large, 121/2" diameter ventilated brake discs developed by Girling from the Kelsey Hayes design sat tight against the front uprights, with large offset hub carriers