Innes Ireland Won Team Lotus Its First Grand Prix | Weeks Later, Colin Chapman Sacked Him

Team Lotus won seventy-nine Grands Prix and seven Constructors' Championships, and every one of those triumphs stands in a line behind a victory almost nobody remembers. October 1961, Watkins Glen, the United States Grand Prix: Innes Ireland, a hard-living Scottish ex-paratrooper who had been thrown out of his car at over 100mph in the Monaco tunnel just months earlier, nursed a Lotus with dying fuel pressure across the line to give Colin Chapman's team its first ever world championship win. Weeks later, Chapman sacked him, and never even told him to his face. In this video I dig into the whole story: the Goodwood afternoon in 1960 when Ireland beat Stirling Moss straight up, the crash that should have ended him, the race that saved Watkins Glen, and the coldest thank you in motor racing. Were you following the sport in sixty-one? And which driver do you think was treated worst by his own team? Tell me in the comments. I go through every single one. Subscribe for more stories from motorsport's golden age.