1993 Racing Season - Lotus X180R

Defending Doc Bundy’s Drivers’ Championship — and chasing the Manufacturers’ title that had eluded it in 1992 — LotuSport returned in 1993 to a series that had begun to work against it: IMSA added 125 lb to the X180R’s minimum weight, raising it to 2,700 lb.

Still entered as the “1992 model X180R” and driven across the year by Doc Bundy, Andy Pilgrim, David Murry, Bo Lemler, Scott Lagasse, Steve Hansen, and Jay Cochran, the Esprits opened the season by sweeping the podium at Miami. Over the combined IMSA and World Challenge campaigns they took three pole positions (one of them in SCCA World Challenge), nine podium finishes across five of the season’s nine races, and three victories — Doc Bundy’s IMSA win at Miami at the head of LotuSport’s first 1-2-3, David Murry’s IMSA win at Atlanta, and Murry’s last-minute SCCA World Challenge victory at Road Atlanta.

The Season in the Team’s Own Words

Of all the seasons the Esprit contested, 1993 is the one the team documented itself. LotuSport published six issues of its own Race Report newsletter between May and December 1993 — written by team owner Jack Ansley, editor Bob Patterson, marketing manager David Arner, and Doc Bundy, who contributed a signed column — and they constitute the closest thing the program has to a diary. They record what broke, what the crew changed between races, what the drivers said within days of the event rather than decades after it, and the running argument with IMSA that defined the year. Each is linked below at the race it covers, and the complete set is listed in the references.

The masthead of the operation, as printed in the first issue: Jack Ansley, team owner; Doc Bundy, driver and consultant; David Arner, marketing; Joe Grassi, crew chief on the No. 10; Ed Webb on the No. 14; Ed Wheeler on the No. 11; Walt Puckett on the No. 12; Kyla Godden, coordinator; and Bob Patterson, newsletter. The box is worth reading across the year, because it records the team contracting in real time: Walt Puckett and the No. 12 disappear from it after the second issue; David Arner is replaced as marketing manager by Buddy Epps by the fifth; and Patterson, who began as “newsletter,” had relabeled himself “gofer/editor” by the third.

Bob Patterson also edited The Lotus Letter, Lotus Cars USA’s own customer newsletter, whose first issue appeared in April 1993 — which is why the two publications share a voice, and why the Miami race report below comes from the corporate newsletter rather than the team’s.

Miami, February 21 — the podium sweep

The season opened on an eleven-turn street circuit in Miami over a twenty-lap sprint, and Lotus was not expecting what happened. The 3.6-liter Porsche 911 Turbos were quicker in qualifying — Hans Stuck first, Nick Ham second, with Hurley Haywood alongside Doc Bundy on the second row. On the opening lap Stuck slid into the tires at turn one, bounced off into Ham’s car and was out; Ham pitted for a tire. Bundy, in The Lotus Letter’s account, “stayed out of the mess and slipped into first,” and Andy Pilgrim and David Murry came through behind him for the first 1-2-3 in LotuSport’s history.

Bundy’s reaction, published in Lotus Cars USA’s own newsletter that April, was less triumph than recalibration:

The same issue records a detail that has since become a registry question: Steve Hansen, driving the fourth Lotus, “bought an X180R, one of the limited edition of 20 race-ready Esprits,” and had come to professional racing from Lotus ownership and vintage events in a Lotus 51 Formula Ford. He is, in the team’s own telling, a customer who ended up on the payroll.

Source: “LotuSport Races at Home”, The Lotus Letter, Vol. 1 No. 1, April 1993.

Atlanta, April 18 — David Murry’s first Supercar win

The second round was the first race ever run on the new road course inside Atlanta Motor Speedway, and it produced a Lotus 1-2. David Murry led all the way; Doc Bundy drove from sixth to second, ahead of both Porsches. Murry had never beaten these people before, and said so:

He was also candid about how little he had expected it. “It was a surprise. I thought the Porsches would dominate,” Murry told the first Race Report. “Once I did the first lap and Stuck didn’t get around me, I felt pretty good. He was 1 1/2 seconds faster in qualifying, I was expecting him to pass. But in three or four laps, I had put a little distance on him.”

Bundy’s second place cost him a great deal more. The first Race Report carries a long interview in which he describes rebuilding his race around a car he no longer trusted — “I literally forgot about the handling of the car. Obviously it wasn’t too far off, but it wasn’t where it should be. It was very nervous. It kept wanting to snap ends on me” — and then dismantling the Porsches by making them work: “The thing that struck me was that the Porsche drivers seemed to be pacing themselves, saving their cars. If they are going to save it, I need to get in there and mess up their strategy some, make them run harder than they wanted to, or get by them and make them chase me to use up their cars. That became my strategy.” His verdict on the day was flat and unadorned: “It was the hardest I’ve worked in the three years of racing the Lotus.”

The same interview contains the sharpest thing Bundy said all year about the two cars, and it is a compliment paid to his own: “The thing about the Lotus is, even though the car was not spot-on the way it can be, it’s still good enough to do well in races. They are amazingly tough. As fast as we are driving them now, as hard as we are running them. It’s amazing. And there is not another car out there as close to stock as we are. None.”

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 1, May 1993.

Road Atlanta, May 8 — the SCCA win nobody planned

The most unexpected of the season’s victories came from a car the team decided to enter two days beforehand. On the Thursday afternoon before Friday practice for the SCCA World Challenge race at Road Atlanta, Ansley watched the other rigs rolling toward the track — the team had been concentrating entirely on IMSA, and none of the LotuSport drivers had turned a lap on the redesigned, widened circuit — and told the crew to enter a car. Georgia First Bank sponsored the No. 14 for Murry; the team fitted Goodyear tires, having run Bridgestones all year under the IMSA rules, and put the rest on a trailer.

Murry took pole on Saturday morning and won the one-hour, forty-lap race by 14.39 seconds from a thirty-eight-car field, lapping some of the slower C-class cars five times. Boris Said’s Saleen Mustang led him into turn one, side by side; Murry took him cleanly on lap two and pulled away, with Elliott Forbes-Robinson’s Nissan 300ZX and the Corvettes of R.K. Smith and Bill Cooper behind. Ansley’s thank-you note in the first Race Report is the only place the sponsorship is recorded: “Winning the SCCA World Challenge race would not have been possible without the sponsorship of Georgia First Bank, and the enthusiasm of their president, Andy Walker.”

Ansley’s thanks that week also name the Lotus Engineering people who kept the cars running, and they are worth recording because the factory’s involvement is otherwise invisible in the results: “Roger Becker’s crew from Lotus Engineering — Alan Nobbs, over the flu after a trip to Australia to help the new Lotus team down under; Colin Marriott, who brought Matthew Becker and Richard Walton — all worked hard.”

Lime Rock, May 31 — the disqualification

Everything after Lime Rock is downstream of Lime Rock. Murry qualified second behind Stuck; under a new IMSA rule the pole-sitter drew a colored ball, and Stuck’s blue ball inverted the top four qualifiers, dropping Murry to third on the grid. He finished third on the road, took the podium, and was disqualified that evening when IMSA ruled his car carried the wrong turbocharger.

The turbocharger — Group Lotus part number 525.4021.603AF — was the correct unit for the 1992-model X180R, the specification under which every LotuSport car had been entered since the start of the 1992 season. Ansley filed a formal appeal, and printed its full text in the second Race Report rather than summarizing it. It is reproduced here as he wrote it.

The appeal failed. Murry’s third place was struck from the record, and the four drivers behind him were promoted a place each — which is why the season results show Bundy fifth and Pilgrim seventh at Lime Rock, one better in each case than the finishing order the team printed on the night. The deeper cost was not the points but the hardware. From Watkins Glen onward the team was forced to race the 1991-specification Esprit SE turbocharger in place of the 1992 X180R unit, a smaller turbo that cut torque. The third Race Report put the resulting deficit in plain numbers: it left Lotus “100 to 200 hp less than Porsche and Pontiac while carrying over 200 lbs. of lead.”

Where the burden of proof sat | Ansley’s case was that the turbocharger fitted to car No. 14 was the correct unit for the car as entered. The rulebook is worth reading alongside it — with one caveat stated up front, because it matters.

The edition we hold is the 1994 IMSA Code, not the 1993 one. It was published the season after this protest, and we cannot show from it that the same words stood in the book Ansley was arguing under. What follows is therefore offered as context, not as the rule that decided the case. That distinction is the whole point of keeping a record like this one.

With that said: the 1994 Code puts the burden squarely on the competitor. Article 11.8.3 — “It is the responsibility of the entrant to prove that his car conforms in every respect to these rules.” Not IMSA’s responsibility to prove it did not. The same article warns that “any detected deviation from the standard production automobile or unauthorized modification not specifically permitted by these rules will result in severe penalties,” and reserves to IMSA the right to “require a competitor to replace any component with a manufacturer’s original or replacement part.”

A protest under a rule of that shape is not a trial. It is a demand that the entrant produce proof. Whether the 1993 book said the same thing in the same words, we cannot establish from the document we hold — and the honest position is that the 1993 edition would settle it, and we do not have it.

And the turbo war left a mark on the rulebook | The dispute did not end with Murry’s disqualification. By 1994 the IMSA Code required that every turbocharged or supercharged Supercar carry an AN-4 fitting on the intake manifold and a 5/8-inch hole drilled through the firewall, so that an IMSA-supplied boost recorder could be mounted in the passenger compartment and its hose run to the engine. IMSA reserved the right to determine maximum boost “based on manufacturer specifications,” and to make a competitor buy or lease the recorder from IMSA.

Two seasons of arguing about what Lotus and Porsche were doing with their turbochargers ended with the sanctioning body wiring the cars for telemetry. The Esprit’s people had spent 1993 insisting the boost was legal. From 1994, the rulebook simply measured it.

Bundy, writing before IMSA ruled, had already framed what was at stake: “We’re still running, but if IMSA does not accept the 1992 specifications for the X180R, we’ll have our work cut out for the rest of the year. While we wait for IMSA’s decision, we are working hard to find an edge.”

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 2, June 1993 — including the full text of the appeal.

The rules move

Two changes arrived alongside the disqualification, and the team believed both were aimed at it. The second Race Report states, under the heading “And the rules change again,” that LotuSport was told before Lime Rock that IMSA was changing the scoring to favor Porsche: five bonus points to the pole-sitter and two to second, awarded on qualifying rather than the race. Porsche had taken pole at Miami, Atlanta and Lime Rock, and would take it again at Watkins Glen and Cleveland. As the newsletter put it, “The 100+ horsepower advantage allows them to get the pole consistently. Now IMSA will award an extra 5 points to the pole winner, 2 to second, making it difficult for anyone other than a Porsche driver to win the championship - even if the Porsches are beaten in the races.”

Bridgestone, meanwhile, introduced a new specification tire at Lime Rock. Bundy’s assessment of it, in his own column, was notably fair-minded about the tire and unsparing about its effect: “In the past, tires were quite a big equalizing factor for us, but now the tire doesn’t seem to go off much, and when it does, you cool it for a lap and it’s right back.. It is a better tire, but it doesn’t favor the lower horsepower, lighter car (Lotus, Mazda, etc.).” A tire that no longer went off removed the one variable the lighter Esprit had been able to exploit against a car with a hundred horsepower more: Porsche could now use its power for the full race distance without paying for it in grip.

The ball draw | The grids themselves were no longer set by the clock. Beginning at Atlanta, the pole-winning driver drew a colored ball: a blue ball inverted the top four qualifiers, a red ball the top eight, and a green ball left the grid as qualified. Stuck drew blue at Atlanta and at Lime Rock, green at Cleveland, and red at Watkins Glen — where, the third Race Report records, the eight inverted cars “tried to un-invert themselves before turn one. It was a 4 and 5-wide scramble. There was not enough room for 5-wide.” Bundy came out of it with tire marks down the left side of his car: “Not many cars missed me,” he said. “Winter (on the pole) was accelerating and slowing before the start. It got us stacked up.”

Watkins Glen, June 27 — racing on the small turbo

The Glen was the first race on the 1991-spec turbocharger, and it was wet. Murry developed a mysterious misfire in Saturday qualifying, never set a lap, and started from the back of the field — from which he finished sixth. Bundy lost his clutch and went round mostly in fourth gear for eighth. Pilgrim and Scott Lagasse both had engine problems, finishing ninth and eleventh. It was, in the newsletter’s own words, a course that “demands torque” — precisely what the mandated turbo had taken away.

Lotus had come to the Glen, the third Race Report notes, “with the lead in drivers and manufacturers points.” It left without either. The standings printed in the same issue put Porsche on 73 manufacturers’ points to Lotus’s 69, and Stuck a point clear of Bundy — the first time all season Lotus had trailed, and it never led again.

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 3, Late July 1993.

Doc Bundy’s “Climbing Hills”

The third Race Report carries the bleakest thing the team ever printed, in Bundy’s own column. It is worth quoting at length, because it is the moment a factory driver in a championship-winning car states publicly that the fight is no longer winnable:

“The controversy continues,” the column opens. “In fact, at times it’s comical. IMSA confers with Porsche on what should be done about turbos on the Lotus cars. Now seriously folks, if you were given the opportunity to equip your competition, would you suggest he runs anything that could make a race of it…? Not!” He closed it without softening: “This has become one looong uphill climb lately and, with IMSA wearing these blinders, the likelihood of us becoming competitive again in this series seems unlikely. We’re dealing with this whole thing on a race-to-race basis and trying to evaluate where we need to be in the future. Just stick with us friends, we’ll find a way over all these hills.”

That the manufacturer of the turbocharger did not recommend the part IMSA had obliged Lotus to run is the single sharpest fact in the six issues, and it appears nowhere else in the record. The allegation that accompanies it — that the sanctioning body took its guidance on the Lotus turbocharger from Porsche — is Bundy’s, made in print over his own name, and no independent source confirms it.

Cleveland, July 10 — Bundy hits the wall on purpose

Bundy grew up just south of Cleveland but had never driven the 2.4-mile, ten-turn Burke Lakefront Airport course. Murry’s No. 14 was sandwiched at the wide first turn, sent airborne, and landed with a broken steering rack — out of the race. Bundy went the other way: “While that whole clump of cars was sorting it out, I was in and gone.” Ninth to fourth on the opening lap.

What followed is a driver describing, without embarrassment, a deliberate decision to crash rather than yield:

“Hurly caught me at about the half-way point in the race. Hurley bumped me in a long sweeper, knocked me off line just enough so that I just touched the wall. I was three inches off of it every lap. I could have backed off, but he would have been by me. So I hit the wall.”

He finished sixth. The most generous line in the fourth issue is his assessment of Steve Hansen, the customer driver in his third professional race, who finished tenth: “His lines were tighter. Every session, race included, he was faster.”

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 4 — “Cleveland Extra”, Very Late July 1993.

Laguna Seca, July 25 — the bump steer

Five cars went west, and at Laguna the crew finally found the fault that had been ruining Bundy’s car since Atlanta. The fifth Race Report names it exactly: “A couple of washers in the rear suspension corrected the bump steer toe out that had been making the car loose all year.” Bundy qualified eighth and finished third — the team’s only IMSA podium between Atlanta and Phoenix — and was explicit that the fix was what did it: “A couple of times I dropped wheels off and got a little bit sideways. With the old setup, I wouldn’t have been able to be so aggressive.”

Jay Cochran drove a Lotus for the first time; Bo Lemler missed Saturday qualifying to run in another race, started last, worked into the mid-pack and then lost his clutch. Bundy’s note on him: “Bo drove one of the best races we have seen him drive. Bo was definitely hooked up at Laguna.”

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 5, September 1993.

Portland, August 1

The fifth Race Report records that Bundy qualified fourth at Portland and started from the front of the grid only because the first four cars were inverted. He led into the first corner and the advantage evaporated at once. “Which allowed me to dictate the pace on the start. So I chose to make a little bit faster start to try to neutralize those guys’ power. But I didn’t neutralize anything,” he said. “I was ahead of them when the green flag fell, but by the time we passed the starter — Shawn, Hans, Nick — they were around me. An extra 200 horsepower makes a difference.” He finished seventh.

Bundy’s fuller verdict on the weekend, which the newsletter prints first, is the more revealing one, because it locates the problem in the car rather than the rulebook: “It was a very frustrating race. I was relatively quick from the get-go. Unfortunately at Portland my car was not as good in the race. It had been good in every practice session and in qualifying… In the race, whether something changed in the car or if the track was more slippery than it had been, I didn’t have quite the handling.”

Phoenix, October 2 — the last podium

At 101 degrees on the Phoenix oval-and-infield course, Pilgrim and Bundy finished second and third behind Stuck, and Bundy’s account of hunting the Porsche is the best driving writing in the six issues. He had Stuck’s tires going off — “I noticed up on 3 and 4 on the banking he was leaving black marks with his rear tires” — and closed:

“We got close to the 10-minute mark, and that’s when I really started pressuring — like down into turn one. He would be a second and a half ahead past start-finish, and I would be absolutely against his bumper in the corner, right up next to him. He started altering his line a bit, which was good. I was confident that I was going to get him. I really wanted to pull it off going into one because I knew I could get away in the infield. Then, nothing. It was as if the motor cut off.”

The engine picked up again after two laps in second gear. By then Stuck and Pilgrim were gone. Bundy’s verdict on the year’s real handicap needs no gloss: “The cars were good. We could definitely feel the extra 100 lbs. of lead. It really affects the off-the-corner performance. We were a second slower than last year. The Bridgestone tires were better. So the weight made a difference.”

A driver comparing his own car year-on-year, on the same circuit and on better tires, and finding it a second a lap slower, is the most exact measure of IMSA’s ballast anywhere in the record — better than the rulebook, because it prices the penalty in lap time.

Bundy’s parting note in the same issue was that the final round would suit them: “Sebring, with its long straightaways and slow corners, is not going to be a good layout for us.” The newsletter’s editor appended a line of his own: "(Doc was right - see page 3)".

Sebring, October 23 — Doc Bundy’s crash

The last race of the year, added to the calendar late, ended with the No. 10 Esprit destroyed and its driver strapped to a board. Bundy told the story himself in the final Race Report, and it is the most extraordinary passage in any of the team’s documents — a first-hand account of the accident whose wreckage is still visible in the car’s later history, and the reason one of the surviving chassis carries the damage it does.

He had qualified thirteenth after the crew changed his clutch between practice sessions, worked his way forward, and was closing on Jarett Freeman’s Porsche at over a second a lap when Freeman’s car broke in front of him:

“There is a long right hand sweeper, then a straightaway down to a hairpin. Exiting the sweeper, I saw his car kind of flounder then go off to the left into the grass. I kept my foot in it, thinking that I need to get by before he hits the tire wall and comes back across the track. But he just kept going. He hit the tires at the bridge and shot right in front of me. I’m trying to calculate — real quick — if I’ve got enough to get by him. I knew it was going to be close. I was clear on the right side. I looked behind him to see if there was a possibility, but there were tires coming out behind him. If I had hit the tires it would have launched me. At the last instant I saw there was no choice. I either T-bone him or go for his front end. So I went for his front end.”

“I couldn’t see anything because the windshield was totally shattered. There was another impact. The car felt like it was spinning. I remember hitting again and seeing the guard rail beside me. I realized the door was gone. I must have spun again, and hit once more, and the car came to a stop. I was over 100 yards beyond the original impact. I understand my hood went almost 200 yards.”

He was conscious throughout, cut the electrics, checked for fire, unbuckled and climbed out — then found he could not stay upright. “My whole left side hurt — leg, arm, hand. I looked at the car. I walked around behind it and noticed the brake lights were stuck on. I looked in the car and saw that the brake pedal was all bent.” The corner workers laid him down on the Florida sand spurs; the ambulance crew, judging the severity of the impact, strapped him to a board with a neck brace and laid a towel over his face because the field was still circulating under yellow. His own summary, delivered to a corner worker: “I said, ‘My car is history.’ One of them said, ‘Don’t worry about that.’ I said, ‘That’s easy for you to say.’”

The race finished under yellow. Murry took sixth, Lemler and Hansen tenth and eleventh from fifteenth and nineteenth on the grid. It was the last race the LotuSport Esprits would run in a season they had opened by locking out the podium.

Source: LotuSport Race Report No. 6, December 1993.