Talk:Colin Chapman/to do

Add information from these pages [1][2] about Chapman's chairs, coffins, and boats, and (especially) the Lotus Microlight aircraft he designed with Burt Rutan.
Organize page into sections

I think organization is hard because Chapman wore many hats (when he wasn't flinging them in the air--that personal trademark should be in the article too!) simutaneously and never ceased any of them. So, it would seem chronological is out as an organizing framework. Maybe something roughly like the following would work:

  * Biographical information
     * Engineer for Bristol Aeroplane
  * Early trials cars and kit cars
  * Chapman as automobile manufacturer
     * Sports cars
     * Luxury specialty cars
  * Chapman as automobile racing director/designer/engineer
     * Sports cars and single-seater formula cars
     * Formula One
  * Chapman as industrial designer/engineer

Someone with skill would then have to weave in how Chapman used racing to improve his road cars (and sometimes vice-versa). I haven't read up on it, but I can imagine that the design philosophy of a Chapman coffin would mean that it was fully capable of navigating The 2g corner.

I could see having a 1950s narrative, a 1960s narrative, etc. to put in perspective all that he was simultaneously accomplishing, but I think something like the above with perhaps a bit of interweaving, would be less repetitious and more Encyclopedic.Fotoguzzi 19:31, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Find a PD or GFDL picture of Chapman
I would consider removing speculation linking the dual-chassis debacle with his health. [Thanks! I see the linkage removed and the article greatly improved in other ways.] In exchange I hope someone could describe the singlemindedness that Chapman displayed when it came to, well, everything. Examples would include his lawyerly interpretation of the rules and a mania for "purity" of design. (Would it be incorrect to imply that Chapman added material to a part only after its manufacture proved unworthy of its divinely-inspired specification?) He designed a "perfect" space-frame car, The Mk. VIII, which virtually had to be dismantled to make adjustments to the less-than-perfect engines that were available at the time. Could a case be made that in using springs as suspension arms and structural tubes as water conduits (early designs), or, later, engines and tubs as stressed chassis members and chassis themselves as inverted wings, that he wasn't designing parts so much as organizing systems? To me, his desire to control every aspect of company, team, and cars, and to win based on his own cleverness, by his interpretation of the rules, may have been a strain that no heart could endure forever (and yes, this speculation is as groundless as his being done-in by the rejection of the dual-chassis [speculation which, mercifully, has been removed]). bkm -- pdx,or,usa