The name was as hip as the Beatles and as charismatic as Carnaby Street and now Lotus is back on the grid. The company says it will compete in Formula One next year, a team revived after 15 years away from the glitz and glamour of grand prix racing it once dominated to become one of the iconic names in motor racing history.

In spite of the indomitable history of the familiar green and yellow badge, it is a sign of the times that the new Lotus team will be British-based but backed entirely by money from Malaysia. Tony Fernandes, the entrepreneurial founder of the Tune Group, which also runs Air Asia, will be the team principal with Mike Gascoyne, the former technical head at the now defunct Jordan and Toyota teams, running the construction operation.

The FIA, the governing body, gave the green light to the Lotus project as it became clear that Formula One could field a bumper grid of 28 cars next season, the most since 1992. As the ink dried on Lotus’s successful application, BMW announced it has sold its team to a Middle Eastern investment group. Although the team has officially slipped out of the sport, the FIA will look for agreement to allow the new operation to continue in 2010 as one of 14 teams in the sport.

But the attention of motor racing fans will be on Lotus, a name that stirs memories of great names and great victories at a time when Formula One was an epic contest between drivers with images that were a blend of gladiator and fighter pilot.

The team was founded by Colin Chapman, a brilliant engineer, whose ability to innovate soon powered his cars to the front of grand prix racing. With drivers like Jim Clark and Graham Hill at the wheel, the Sixties became a period when British cars started to dominate Formula One after years of rule by the Italians.

The Lotus name was also turning into an icon on the roads, Chapman building a series of sports cars, including the little, white Elan driven glamorously by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in the television series, The Avengers, which even today is a cult classic.

But Chapman’s genius was not just in the workshop; he was a salesman, too, and caused a sensation in 1968 when his green and yellow cars were suddenly rolled out in the red, white and gold and the Gold Leaf cigarette brand. Sponsorship in Formula One was here to stay.

Although Chapman continued to use the livery of his tobacco sponsors, his cars somehow still retained a distinctive and attractive look, the menacingly black-and-gold John Player Specials still a favourite with many fans, which were the followed by the bright yellow Camel-sponsored cars.

Seven constructors’ champions and six drivers’ titles were notched up from 79 victories in rapid time and the team only started a sad decline from 1982 after Chapman died of a heart attack, aged just 54, amid allegations of fraud after he became involved in the ill-fated DeLorean scandal. Neither the team nor the company were ever the same afterwards, the team leaving Formula One in 1994 and the car business owned by General Motors and Bugatti before being sold in 1996 to Proton, the Malaysian state-owned carmaker now behind the new venture in concert with Tony Fernandes and other Malaysian companies.