The name Eric Broadley may not mean much to contemporary motor sport fans but the soft-spoken Englishman, who passed away on Sunday, played a small but significant part in F1 history. His Lola cars may never have won a Grand Prix but Broadley made a considerable mark in Indycar racing and on the international sports car scene.
Broadley was regarded as highly as Colin Chapman and John Cooper when it came to engineering innovation in the 50s and 60s. Very much a hands-on designer, Broadley led his small workforce in Bromley, Kent by producing sports cars so competitive that Lola was commissioned by the Bowmaker team to design and build an F1 car for John Surtees and Roy Salvadori to race in the 1962 World Championship.
Surtees actually put the Climax-powered Lola Mk4 on pole for its first World Championship race, the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. Surtees would win a non-championship race at Mallory Park and come close to victory in a Grand Prix by finishing second in Britain and in Germany.
Meanwhile, a short but lucrative contract to assist Ford in the automotive giant's efforts to beat Ferrari at Le Mans helped Broadley move his expanding company to Slough and fund the construction of the Lola T70 sports car, plus the T90 Indycar. Graham Hill used the latter to win at Indianapolis in 1966, Surtees taking the first CanAm title in the same year with a T70-Chevrolet.
When Surtees struggled to make the Honda F1 car work in 1967, he called upon Broadley to provide a substitute for the overweight Japanese chassis, the so-called 'Hondola' giving Surtees a late victory in the Italian Grand Prix. That would be the height of Lola's F1 success despite subsequent efforts with Hill's Embassy Lola outfit and small teams that were scarcely front line.
Indycar racing evolved into a very different story when Lola became the car to have and provided several championships and many victories for a string of drivers, including Nigel Mansell in 1993.
Lola also cleaned up in other single-seater formulae (notably Formula 5000) but Broadley will probably be remembered best for his Lola T70 Mk3B, considered one of the greatest sports/GT cars of all time thanks to its looks and performance.
In 1991, Broadley was awarded the MBE for his services to motor racing; an appropriate accolade for a quiet man who made an immense contribution.