The Lotus Position
As a general rule, most of our photo shoots involve an editor or two, a photographer and, of course, a classic car owner. However, sometimes the number of personnel involved goes well beyond that — perhaps we might include an intern photographer: the magazine’s art director might turn up to offer his design assistance, or one of the sales team might fancy escaping from the office for an hour or three.
That’s sort of what happened when we arranged for a studio photo shoot with Howden Ganley and his Lotus Eleven.
With Howden not resident in New Zealand, classic car enthusiast, Neil Tolich, has been ‘minding’ the Lotus, the car being stored alongside Neil’s Renault Alpine A110, Porsche Speedster, Lamborghini Espada and Ferrari Testa Rossa … oh, and not to forget his prized Trekka!
And, as the Lotus hasn’t been run under its own steam for many a year, Neil was first choice to trailer the car out to Parkside Towers. Rex Oddy — who has recently revived the Club Lotus NZ magazine — also gave up his Sunday to give Neil a hand with towing duties.
With all that in place, we were lucky enough to have everything timed to a weekend during Howden’s most recent trip back to New Zealand — and that meant we would be able to snap him alongside his famous old racer. Just for good measure, Jim Barclay — one of the chief organizers of the upcoming Gulf Oil Howden Ganley F5000 Festival — also dropped by to lend his expert hand to the proceedings.
The first order of the day was to give the Lotus a bit of a dust-off, and as you’d expect of a real hands-on racer, Howden buckled down to the task alongside Rex, Neil and Jim. They soon had the Lotus gleaming, and ready to be rolled into our studio — you can see the results if you flip over a few pages. I suppose you could say that many hands make light work, a cliché that’s very apposite when referring to a car which only weighs in at slightly more than 400 kilograms!
Anyway, many thanks to Howden, Neil, Rex and Jim for all their help, and for turning a simple photo shoot into something of a special occasion.
We hope this month’s special features set the scene for the Gulf Oil Howden Ganley F5000 Festival — we’re certainly looking forward to the event in order to blow away our post-xmas blues and set us up for yet another classic year.
Finally, everyone at NZ Classic Car would like to wish all our readers a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year — we hope to see you all in 2015.
P.S Please feel free to check out our new website - themotorhood.com. This new site is essentially a combination of Parkside Media’s three motoring titles – Newzealandclassic CAR,NZV8 and Nzperformancecar – and promises to bring you up to date with all the latest motoring news, reviews, interviews and what’s going on behind the scenes as well as what’s coming up in future editions of all three magazine; and its all exclusive to this site. At present, the site is still pretty much a work in progress, for the few months at least as we begin to post more content on a daily basis and monitor feedback in order to ensure its success.