November 14, 2022
A look at the revolutionary Lotus 108 – the machine that took Chris Boardman to Olympic gold
This article was originally published in Rouleur 115. Support our journalism by subscribing here.
The most beautiful bike there has ever been came about because of the combined consequences of a Ford Cortina Mark One GT conking out and the 1970s oil shock.
The Lotus 108 was a sleek, low-slung bike with organic lines and a classy-looking black and yellow paint job. It looks futuristic even now, in 2022; 30 years ago in 1992 it was nothing short of revolutionary. Its first iteration was designed by Mike Burrows in the late 1980s and it was picked up and developed by Lotus Cars, who’d identified a potentially lucrative sideline in high-end race bikes in the very early 1990s. They needed a guinea pig, to help with the R&D, and a marketing strategy, and these two questions turned out to have the same answer: Chris Boardman.
Back in the days when British gold medals at the Olympic Games could routinely be counted on the fingers of one hand (between 1928 and 2000, Team GB won five or fewer golds every Olympics bar one, when they took six) the Lotus 108 was one of the biggest stories of the 1992 Games in Barcelona. Boardman, a young trackie and time triallist, was the perfect subject for Lotus and Burrows – he was open-minded, talented, very good at identifying the right people to work with and physically flexible.
For his part, Burrows was a model plane enthusiast who’d fallen into engineering by accident when he got a job turning lathes at a metalworking company in St Albans. Burrows, who died recently, drove the Ford Cortina in question, but when he tried to rebore the engine, he hadn’t quite got it right and the car blew up. Still needing to get to work, and without the financial resources to buy a new car, he borrowed his wife’s bike to get around.
By the time the Ford Cortina had been sorted out, the price of petrol had rocketed, so he shelled out £42 for a bike of his own. He was later pulled along to a local evening ‘10’, where a time of 27:05 didn’t mark him out for greatness. However he realised that he could make significant gains by applying what he’d learned about aerodynamics in constructing model planes to cycling; crucially this would also mean he didn’t have to train. He understood…