Lola Cars, modest beginnings

Lola Cars International Ltd. was a British race car engineering company in operation from 1958 to 2012. The company was founded by Eric Broadley in Bromley, Kent in very modest premises (picture-above in 1961), before moving to a new place in Slough, Buckinghamshire and finally in Huntington, Cambridgeshire.

Lola Cars endured for more than fifty years to become one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of racing cars in the world. Broadley started by building small front-engined sports cars, then Formula Junior single-seaters, before diversifying into a wider range of sporting vehicles.

Lola was one of the top chassis suppliers in the 1960s. After its small front-engines sports cars came various single-seaters including Formula 3, Formula 2, ChampCars and Formula 1 cars. Notably, Eric Broadley designed the Ford V8 powered Lola Mk.6 coupe (picture-below) and Ford took a keen interest in this and paid Broadley to put the company on hold and merge his ideas with Roy Lunn’s work, giving rise to the Ford GT40.