Peter Warr, who will be best remembered as the man who served as team manager for Colin Chapman\u2019s Team Lotus Formula One team and kept the operation running in the wake of Chapman\u2019s death, has himself passed away at his home in France following a heart attack on October 4. Warr, who won the inaugural Japanese Grand Prix for sports cars in 1963 with a Lotus 23B, initially joined the Lotus sales department in 1958, becoming team manager for the Grand Prix team in 1969. He guided both Jochen Rindt (1970) and Emerson Fittipaldi (1972) to their World Championships before leaving in 1976 to fulfill similar duties with Walter Wolf\u2019s operation, but then left Wolf to manage Fittipaldi\u2019s eponymous team before returning to Lotus in 1981. Following Chapman\u2019s death in 1982, Warr took the team back to the top of F1.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeter Warr was a man of great ability and character who lived life to the full and put in very much more than he took out,\u201d offered Clive Chapman, son of the Lotus founder. \u201cHe was a leading figure in Formula One in the \u201970s and \u201980s, and helped many great drivers to realize their dreams. At Team Lotus he managed not only the team, the sponsors and the drivers, but also, and perhaps most importantly, my father; he played a vital role in enabling him to realize the potential of his engineering brilliance.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter my father\u2019s death in 1982,\u201d Chapman continued, \u201cPeter stepped up to lead Team Lotus and take it back into the winner\u2019s circle with Ayrton Senna at the wheel; a fantastic achievement in difficult circumstances. He was a sophisticated man of great taste, who cared always for his family and his team; always thinking of those around him and always thinking of ways around the opposition, in the best possible spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n
To his family and many friends, Vintage Racecar extends its sincerest condolences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Warr, who will be best remembered as the man who served as team manager for Colin Chapman\u2019s Team Lotus Formula One team and kept the operation running in the wake of Chapman\u2019s death, has himself passed away at his home in France following a heart attack on October 4. Warr, who won the inaugural Japanese Grand Prix for sports cars in 1963 with a Lotus 23B, initially joined the Lotus sales department in 1958, becoming team manager for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":575168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263,18114,18330],"tags":[17152,18435,13275,18107,16791],"class_list":["post-491594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-car-culture","category-people","category-profiles-car-culture","tag-car-culture","tag-people","tag-peter-warr","tag-people-profiles","tag-profiles"],"yoast_head":"\n