The first of the T70 family of racing cars was created in 1965 by Eric Broadley who founded Lola Cars. It was designed after he had left the Ford design team who were working on the GT 40. Ford had decided in 1962 to "win Le Mans" and having failed to buy Ferrari, had resorted to designing their own car. At the time Eric Broadley had just designed the Ford Fairlane engined Lola GT, a car which in one step introduced almost all of the design features of Sports Racing cars ever since, e.g. monocoque construction, mid engine etc.

He was therefore invited to design what was to become the Ford GT 40. After some time on the project he left because he felt that the design had become "design by committee" and that was therefore being pulled in too many directions, particularly towards becoming a heavier production car.

The T70 was nearer to what he intended the Ford to be plus the results of some lessons learned from the GT 40's behaviour on the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans.

The striking rear body shape of the T 70 stemmed from the attempt to remove the lift which made the original GT 40 a "white knuckle ride " down the Mulsanne. Having observed that the very successful T70 spyder (it won the American Can-Am series) did not suffer from lift over the rear body, he introduced a similar flat rear deck on the coupe version, to such good effect that instead of 300 kg of lift as in the GT 40, it in fact generated 200 kg of down force. Broadley thus introduced the concept of trading drag for down force (at the time the shape was misunderstood by some who criticised its drag, which was inevitably higher than other GT cars of the period, which were, as was normal then designed for minimum drag.

The Lola T70 was therefore well suited to tracks with fast sweeping bends such as Spa, where the trade off of drag for down force meant that it could take corners flat which other cars had to lift for.

The T70 was not very successful at endurance racing such as Le Mans, due mostly to lack of a competitive engine. The racing small block Chevy of the period was developed for the high octane fuels then available in the USA, and did not thrive on European fuel. However it achieved considerable success in shorter races such as the BOAC 500 where its good handling and light weight made it very competitive.

The T70 III B was the last of the line, it had a lower flatter front to separate the airflow between the top and underside of the car at as low a point as possible. This minimised pressure under the car ,the beginning of ground effect, and other aerodynamic refinements. It was almost always powered by a 327 or (later) a 350 Small Block Chevy engine. Its career ended effectively at the international level when Big Banger racing was ended by rule changes. These excluded the big V8's and allowed Porsche (917) and Ferrari (312) to use F1 derived engines in smaller Sports cars which eventually benefited from the drag vs. down force lesson learned from the T70.

The T70 was a technically important step in the evolution of the Sports Racing car, embodying almost all of the features of more recent cars .

Copyright D.Bell 1999