Rule number one in the PR playbook. If you are a racing driver or a team principal, never, ever say you have a favourite round or a favourite venue in a championship. You’re only going to get yourself into big trouble with the organisers, the home fans of all the other events, and most of all, your own PR department.

So, before I get myself in hot water, let me categorically state that I am, most definitely, not saying Jarama is Lola’s favourite racetrack. But I will admit it does hold a special place in our collective heart.

Built in 1967, Jarama remains resolutely old school, with a tight, twisty, highly technical layout. Coming back here is like visiting an old friend. Jarama is part of Lola’s history. We’ve got skin in the game here. It’s where we first put tyres on the track in public after Lola was reborn in 2022, when Lucas di Grassi and Zane Maloney ran the Lola T001 Gen3 Evo in the 2024 official Formula E pre-season test.

Going back a little further, Lola still holds the LMP2 lap record for Jarama. That was set by Miguel Ángel de Castro in a Lola B05/40 in 2006 at the 1000 km of Jarama with a time of 1:26.138. Driving for ASM Team Racing for Portugal, de Castro, and his teammates Miguel Amaral and Ángel Burgueño won the LMP2 class and finished second overall. It was a genuine giant-killer act, as the Lola finished directly ahead of three much more powerful LMP1 cars.

Admittedly, with its narrow width, tight corner sequences and short straight, Jarama is one of those circuits where, if you can get ahead and drive defensively, you stand a fair chance of staying ahead. The greatest example of that was Gilles Villeneuve’s epic drive at the 1981 Spanish Grand Prix in his powerful, turbocharged, but less than finely balanced Ferrari 126CK.

The Canadian driver managed to hold Jacques Laffite, John Watson, Carlos Reutemann and Elio de Angelis at bay in their much more agile Ligier, McLaren, Williams and Lotus charges, respectively. It was like watching a multi-coloured train with five F1 cars running nose to tail and all crossing the line within 1.2 seconds of each other. Interviewed afterwards, Villeneuve said he’d driven as slowly as he possibly could to win the race.

But even if you have the perfect car and drive it as fast as you possibly can, that’s no guarantee of success at Jarama. In 1987, another Canadian driver, John Jones, put the rapid, sweet-handling Cosworth-powered T87/50 on pole in the International F3000 Championship race at the circuit for the factory Lola team.

Sadly, the race didn’t pan out well, and Jones finished 10th. But Luis Pérez-Sala took 5th in another Lola T87/50 to end the season runner-up in the International F3000 Championship. And 7,000 miles away, Kazuyoshi Hoshino won the Japanese F3000 title in a T87/50 that year.

Rewind further back to 1974, and Lola was present at Jarama, at the pinnacle of the sport with the T370 F1 race car. That was Lola’s fourth F1 car, following the 1962 Lola Mk4, the 1967 T130 / Honda 300, fondly remembered as the ‘Hondola’, and the 1968 T180 / Honda RA301.

The Lola T370 came about because Graham Hill needed a car for the 1974 season. The previous year, the two-time F1 champion had formed his own Formula One team, entering a Shadow-Ford DN1 for himself in the World Championship. Backed by Embassy cigarettes, the season proved disappointing, yielding no points and a best finish of ninth.

One of the problems Hill faced was that running a customer car meant relying on developments from the works team filtering through, a limitation that convinced Hill he needed a team where he could make the key decisions and guide its direction himself. Without the facilities to build a car in-house, Hill turned to Eric Broadley and Lola to design and construct one for him. Results were mixed: ​​while Hill qualified for Jarama in 1974, he did not finish the race.

Lola had fared much better at Jarama five years earlier, with Lola winning the 1969 Formula One non-championship Madrid Grand Prix. The driver was Briton Keith Holland, and the car was a Formula 5000 Lola T142, powered by a rear-mounted, 500bhp 5.0-litre Chevrolet V8; it was most definitely not a car for the faint-hearted.

A fearsome-sounding machine, the Lola lay silent for decades in a garage awaiting a restoration that never came. At least not until the television programme Salvage Squad brought it back to life in 2002.

The TV team even managed to reunite it with Keith Holland, who got back behind the wheel at Brands Hatch. When asked what it was like to drive the Lola T142 back in the day, Keith recalled with brutal honesty:

“The advantage the Formula 5000 had was that it had more power in a straight line than Formula 1 cars had. But when you came to the corners, of course, you had a big lump of Chevy engine in the back. It took me some time to get in the swing of going fast with it; it was a handful; there’s no doubt about that.”

Now there’s a driver who wasn’t too worried about what his PR people might say!