1991 Racing Season — Lotus X180R

For 1991, IMSA began promoting the Bridgestone Potenza Supercar Championship, a series with rules very similar to SCCA’s World Challenge but with a much wider audience, including being televised. To campaign against factory-backed teams from Porsche, Mazda, and Chevrolet, it was decided to establish LotuSport under the leadership of Jack Ansley.

Besides team founder Doc Bundy, drivers added to the lineup included David Murry, Michael Brockman, Bobby Carradine, Paul Newman and Bo Lemler.

For the 1991 season, one of LotuSport’s main sponsors was Eclipse, an audio subsidiary of Fujitsu and based nearby the Lotus Cars USA headquarters in Atlanta.

The car’s first appearance was not the factory’s. The X180R made its IMSA debut in the hands of Duncan Drye, a British driver about whom almost nothing else is recorded. Running No. 07, he qualified fourteenth and finished thirteenth at Lime Rock on May 27, 1991, then retired on the opening lap at Watkins Glen on June 30 with a mechanical failure. He was entered for Laguna Seca on July 21 but never arrived, and never raced the car again. Ten points from those two starts left him twenty-fifth in the final championship standings. The official LotuSport team did not appear until the fifth IMSA round, at Road Atlanta on September 1 — where Doc Bundy won on the team’s first outing.

Why Drye ran at all is unrecorded, though the timing is suggestive. IMSA’s rulebook held that “model variants introduced after the first race of the season will not be approved until next season,” meaning an X180R had to be on the grid at Lime Rock or forfeit eligibility for all of 1991. A lone car appearing at the first two rounds and then withdrawing has the shape of an entry made to hold the door open. No source confirms it, and none records who entered the car, who paid for it, or which chassis it was: the results archives list its entrant, sponsors and colors as unknown, and log the chassis simply as “real number unknown.”

Lotus did not, in the end, win the 1991 World Challenge, but for two seasons it had been one of only two marques that ever did. When Boris Said took his Baer Racing Ford Mustang to victory through near-freezing fog at the Autodromo del Norte on November 3 — the eighth and final round, in Saltillo, Mexico — SCCA’s own release recorded what the result meant: it “marked the first time in the two-year World Challenge history that a Corvette or Lotus Turbo did not win.” Every previous race in the championship’s existence had fallen to a Chevrolet or to an Esprit.

Three Straight, After a Year in the Wilderness | Lotus had not won a World Challenge race since the 1-2 sweep at Denver that closed its 1990 campaign. The drought broke on the same street course a year later: at Round Five on August 24, 1991, Doc Bundy took his Eclipse Lotus Esprit Turbo past Shawn Hendricks just after half-distance and won by 6.227 seconds, at 5,280 feet, where the turbocharged car had the altitude to itself. “It’s been a long, dry season for us,” Bundy said. “This victory will breathe new life into Lotus’ American road racing interests. This should renew everybody’s interest.” Asked why the car went so well in the thin air, he was blunt about the engineering: “The turbo really gives us an advantage here. All turbos seem to be a little stronger here. We make our own environment.” Lotus then won the next two rounds as well — Bobby Carradine at Road America and again at Texas World Speedway — and finished the year second in the manufacturers’ championship, 71 points to 43 behind Chevrolet.

A Turbocharger Fire at Des Moines | The season’s cruellest round was the third, on the Des Moines street course on July 14. Bundy started from pole, led the opening four laps, and was still leading the 30-lap timed race on the final lap when the car began to lose power. Hendricks and R.K. Smith went by, Hendricks taking the round win. SCCA’s release describes what happened next without embellishment: Bundy, “with his Eclipse Mobile Electronics Lotus Esprit Turbo full of flames and smoke, managed to get across the finish line, slam on the brakes and bail out of the car.” The turbocharger had caught fire. He was treated for minor burns and classified third — and still set the fastest race lap of the day, 1:47.932 (66.708 mph).

Second in the Championship — in a Corvette | Bobby Carradine finished the 1991 World Challenge season second in the drivers’ championship on 173 points, ahead of Andy Pilgrim on 170. The final seventeen of those points were not scored in a Lotus. Having taken 152 points from seven rounds in the No. 9 Lotusport Esprit, Carradine ran the Saltillo finale as co-driver of Shawn Hendricks’s Bakeracing Corvette — the car and the driver he had spent the year racing against — and the pair finished fifth, which was all Hendricks needed to clinch the title. SCCA’s release notes the switch plainly: Carradine, “who drove a Lotus prior to this race, moved into second place with 173 points.” Without the drive in a rival Chevrolet, the runner-up place in the championship would have gone elsewhere.

Bo Lemler’s Other Car | Lemler’s blank in the opening round of the drivers’ table is not an absence. At Sears Point on May 4 he was on the grid in the Super Production class, sharing an Archer Brothers Eagle Talon with Mitch Wright — and the pair won the class outright, finishing eleventh overall. He made his World Challenge debut in the Lotus at Dallas four weeks later, and closed the year 13th in the World Challenge drivers’ standings on 84 points and 25th in Super Production on 30. Super Production ran as one of three classes in the 1991 series alongside World Challenge itself; a third, Super Sport, was new for the year and never drew a Lotus entry.

For the Bridgestone Supercar Championship, all race cars were required to run on Bridgestone Potenza RE71 tires, trimmed to semi-racing depth, except during wet races where full-depth RE71 tires were allowed.

Split between the two series, LotuSport contested three IMSA Bridgestone rounds and six SCCA World Challenge rounds across the year, with Doc Bundy, Bobby Carradine, Paul Newman, Michael Brockman, and Bo Lemler sharing the driving.

In the three IMSA rounds the team campaigned — of the seven that made up the 1991 Supercar season — the X180R took a single win (33 percent), placed at least one driver in the top two of every race it entered, and collected five podium finishes across those three events.

The Season Opener, by the Official Boxscore | SCCA Pro Racing’s boxscore for the World Challenge opener at Sears Point on May 4, 1991 — a three-hour race won by Shawn Hendricks’s Bakeracing Corvette — records the shape of the new team’s first outing. Doc Bundy finished second in the Eclipse Mobile Electronics Lotus, 95.67 seconds behind, having qualified third; Bobby Carradine took fourth in his Lotus Esprit Turbo debut, and Michael Brockman and Paul Newman co-drove the third Esprit to seventh. SCCA’s own release for the round noted that “Carradine wasn’t the only actor on the course that day,” and that Bundy “led Lotus’ three-car effort.” Lotus took second in the manufacturers’ points for the round, behind Chevrolet. The full timing sheets are reproduced in the 1991 World Challenge archive.

The championship the team could not reach was Chevrolet’s: Bakeracing’s Corvettes took the teams’ title on 242 points and Chevrolet the manufacturers’ on 71, a second straight for the marque. Lotus was runner-up in both.

The Del Mar Weekend in the Los Angeles Times

With five minutes left in qualifying for the Camel Grand Prix of Greater San Diego at Del Mar, Bobby Carradine held provisional pole in his Type 105 X180R — only to be bumped to the second row in the final minute when Porsche’s Hans Stuck set a series course record of 72.972 m.p.h. Carradine qualified third at 72.660 m.p.h., behind teammate Doc Bundy. Martin Henderson covered the session, and Carradine’s parallel careers as actor and racer, for the Los Angeles Times of October 13, 1991.

Newspaper articleOctober 13, 1991

Giving a Good Performance

Grand Prix: Actor Robert Carradine bumped from pole, but says he’s got touch for racing.

By Martin Henderson, Times Staff Writer

DEL MAR — If Robert Carradine blows a line on a movie set, the director just re-shoots the scene.

But if Bobby Carradine blows a line on the race course at 110 m.p.h., then Robert Carradine has a big problem.

Carradine is starting in the second row for today’s Bridgestone Potenza Supercar Series at the Camel Grand Prix of Greater San Diego.

Having starred alongside John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Walter Matthau and Dennis Hopper, Carradine might be best known for leading the “Revenge of the Nerds.” He also appeared in “Coming Home” and “The Long Riders,” but he is as accomplished behind the wheel of his Lotus Esprit Turbo SE as he is in front of the camera.

“There are certain people who are supposed to be race car drivers,” Carradine said, “and I’ve got that. I’ve got that thing that makes me have to race. I have to do it.”

And he has done it very well. He won a sailboat race at summer camp when he was 10, began racing go-carts when was 11 and has been racing cars since 1976. He won his first professional race, in Holtville, and his last race, an Sports Car Club of America World Challenge race at Elkhart Lake, Wis.

“The thing about racing that appeals to me is your destiny is in your own hands at that moment,” Carradine said. “I won a race in the Lotus at Road America, and I won it. And that’s it. You can’t do better.”

It’s kind of like Carradine’s recent cable performance in “As Is,” for which he won an Ace Award for Best Actor.

The second-youngest son of actor John Carradine couldn’t do much better Saturday. He was the pole-sitter with five minutes left in the 30-minute qualifying window at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, only to be knocked to the second row in the final minute when Hans Stuck established a series course record of 72.972 m.p.h. in a Porsche 911 Turbo. Carradine qualified third (72.660) on the 10-turn, 1.6-mile course, behind teammate Doc Bundy and ahead of another actor teammate, Michael Brockman.

Carradine has balanced both careers, but not without second thoughts.

“Inevitably, at some point in the racing season, there’s a direct conflict,” he said. “I can’t tell the movie people why I can’t be there because they wouldn’t let me go.”

So he acts. But all things being equal, he would race. But racing only pays the mortgage on his house in Colorado. Acting pays for the family, the obligations, the lifestyle and the house in the Hollywood Hills.

“I know he has goals and aspirations to other levels,” said Bundy, a former GTP driver for Corvette. “He’s not unrealistic. Given the right circumstances, I think he could progress up into the next levels of racing.”

Bundy said Carradine’s strengths are his lack of fear, his concentration, his feel for the car and his quickness. Oh, and he has no lack of confidence.

“(Lotus) could sell the seat for more than they’re paying me,” Carradine said. “They could bring money in every weekend, but I don’t think they could win with a guy that’s buying a ride.”

Carradine said he knows his name has helped his second career, but it’s not responsible for it.

“It relies more on talent,” he said. “Today in qualifying, I was the fastest car for most of the session, and you can’t fake that.”

Between the green and checkered flags, there’s little tolerance for acting.

Reproduced verbatim from the Los Angeles Times. Original spelling, punctuation and emphasis are the newspaper's own.