It was one of the most embarrassing F1 entries ever.

In 1997, Lola turned up to the first race, woefully unprepared, and after one humiliating failure to qualify, the team closed its doors for good less than two weeks later.

So what went wrong? Why was the car so bad and why did Lola commit to its doomed entries

so late in the day? To help me, Glenn Freeman get to the bottom of those questions, I'm joined

by Ed Straw and Sam Smith.

Welcome back to bring back V10s, gents. I said after our France 1989 episode that we'd have to find more common ground for you both now that we'd run out of Paul Rickard races from our era. And it turns out we've done it because you both love rubbish F1 cars and Sam loves Lola. So Sam, it's only fair that you get to take the opening question first.

So when you think of Lola's 1997 F1 entry, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

It's just the fact that all the constituent parts seem to be terrific and real and credible,

but the end result was just so abject.

Nothing more than that.

I think the hope was it was going to be a really forceful entry, working on the heritage

that Lola had in Formula One and bringing lots of really good engineers together, and it

just never worked out that way.

So, yeah, the hopes dashed within what a race,

that's it. Not even a race, a qualifying session. And I said there, you love Lola. That's of course

because you worked there for a long time, but you didn't join until a few years after this

sorry scenario. So during your time there in the 2000s, did people ever talk about what happened

with the F1 project or was that a topic that you weren't allowed to mention inside the walls

of Huntingdon? In hushed tones, it was like the topic that dare not speak its name when I

first joined in 2002. And we were forever remembered about the project because

there was a lone tub in the corner of the stalls which people sort of did a little hex

when they went past it just to you know banish some of the spirits from that from that time but

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