Zhejiang Geely Holding Group’s British brand Lotusis also the owner of Volvo and its own brand, Geely Auto.
From 1986 to 1993 GM owned Lotus with a 91 percent stake in the brand.
In 1958 when Lotus first entered Formula 1 as Team Lotus.
Lotus, a British sports car brand founded in 1952 by Colin Chapman, began selling its cars as kits exclusively to privateers and trialists, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s kit cars were discontinued. Later in the mid-1970s, Lotus began selling its factory-built cars.
It is not only recognized for manufacturing sports cars and racing cars that stand out for their light weight and excellent handling qualities, but also for its successes in competitions such as F1.
Mika Hakkinen, Mario Andretti and even Ayrton Senna are pretty well known names in F1 history, later on they were world champions but before they became that these drivers had the chance to drive for Lotus in the team’s early stages in F1.
Lotus had several victories on different occasions, with a total of 7 constructors’ championship victories, from 1963 to 1978, out of 491 races they managed to take 79 victories and managed to take 6 drivers’ championships (1963, 1965, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1978).
Lotus’s involvement ended at the end of the 1994 season after it was bought by Dave Hunt, brother of James Hunt, which was renamed to Pacific Racing a season later, Pacific Racing exited F1 racing.
In 2010 Lotus returned, it had been 16 years since the team had the opportunity to race in F1 again, only this time it teamed up with Renault to build an unstoppable machine.
In 2012 Kimi Räikkönen achieved third place in the drivers’ championship, all thanks to the car that Lotus built. They achieved 4th place in the constructors’ championship, and as the seasons went by they obtained more victories on behalf of the team.
Again in December 2015 the team was sold, the Lotus F1 team name was officially dropped on 3 February 2016 and it was announced that they would race as Renault Sport F1 Team.
Lotus was also remembered for the commercials they did, such as jumping over a trailer while their single-seater passed under it. We all believed that Lotus would not return.
5 days ago, on the official Lotus account on TikTok, a video was posted saying ‘the GOAT is back 🐐👑’ which caused a lot of confusion in his followers.
@lotuscars the GOAT is back 🐐👑 #lotus #cityboy #cityboysummer #comedy #goat cheers @ryanair < ♬ JDM Trap Beat X Mr Smokey – Yan 394
A day later in another video someone commented that the team needs to return to F1, which Lotus replied:
@lotuscars
It seems that the admin of the Lotus account understands his audience very well and knows how to approach and as a result he was able to have more views with better results and because of this, after this comment, Lotus began to grow quite a bit in social networks.
If we take into account that there are around 884 million users on TikTok, the young public and car fans were attracted to Lotus’ used strategy of being part of the community on social networks.
Being a fan of cars, it is very exciting that a brand with a history like Lotus, achieve a return with more popularity and strength and above all that it is this big.
It is not yet known what their strategy is, we just have to wait, they may be able to return to racing and compete against the best F1 teams but it may not be, since other teams are on the waiting list to be able to race until 2026, an example it’s porsche.
The return of Lotus on social networks has surprised many, and we will be surprised if they race again, hopefully we can see them compete again against the big teams in the near future.