Epic Restoration A Talbot Sunbeam-lotus, restored by a Mclaren race team boss
A chance conversation led ‘Talbot badger’ Chris Tolman into an obsessive restoration, alongside his day job – running cars for Mclaren’s British GT Driver Development programme
Low Point ‘The headlining – I had to do it twice. You fit it with the screen out, then fit the screen… but it moved, so the screen had to come out and I started again’ Chris Tolman
It actually drove,’ recalls Chris Tolman of the Sunbeam Lotus he procured as a basis for a client project. ‘But it was floppy, smelly, horrible, all the controls were woolly… it was a typical worn-out, rusty old Sunbeam Lotus. And Phil had already decided he wanted a concours example.’
Tolman Motorsport runs a pair of Mclaren 570S cars in the British GT Championship, but also restores and rebuilds cars of an earlier vintage. It provides track support to private customers too, and it was at Snetterton that Chris found a private obsession mingling with a professional challenge.
‘I was there with Phil Shaw, running his Ferrari 458 Challenge Stradale,’ says Chris. ‘We were chatting between sessions and I made a flippant comment about a Sunbeam Lotus. Phil’s eyes lit up and he said, “I’ve wanted one of those for ages!” So before he could change his mind I said, “I’ll build you one.”’
Chris’s life-long connection to the marque meant he knew a number of fellow enthusiasts, one of whom could have provided the ideal project car straight away.
‘Unfortunately, just before I contacted him, my friend had sold the car he’d been working on for years. But he did have a huge store of spares, some of them quite special, so we bought the lot.’
Chris found another bodyshell, but Phil didn’t like it and discovered his own – a car with a DAC number plate, significant to Sunbeam Lotus fans because they were the final batch to be sold off, all of them via one dealership in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.
The ultimate aim
Phil Shaw actually wanted rather more than a concours car, as he explains, ‘I wanted it to be the best car I could have had in period. There were lots of upgrades you could order when they were new, because they were created as homologation specials for motor sport – they won the World Rally Championship for Talbot in 1981. And I knew Chris could find all the right bits.’
Chris’s inspection of the car confirmed it already had a limited-slip differential, high-ratio steering rack, Bilstein dampers and a negative camber front crossmember. With the stash of spares he’d acquired, added to at least 30 years of enthusiasm for the model, Chris was licensed to go all-out in the creation of the ultimate Sunbeam Lotus – as ordered new in 1982.
‘My father worked for a Talbot garage when I was a kid in Dorset,’ says Chris. ‘Apparently the dealership had a stand at the Dorset Steam fair with a replica of Henri Toivonen’s Sunbeam Lotus rally car, and they couldn’t get me out of it.’
Chris’s father later worked for Richard Guy who had in turn been apprenticed to Des O’dell, Talbot’s head of motor sport and the man behind the Sunbeam Lotus. Richard Guy’s apprentice was Phil Davidson, to whom Chris would turn some 30 years later for the rebuild of this car’s engine.
‘By the age of 12 I was a massive Talbot badger,’ says Chris. ‘I built my own rally replica with a 1300cc engine at 17, then went to work at Prodrive, and after that at Ralliart for Andrew Cowan, who won the original London to Sydney Marathon for Rootes.’
In other words, Chris had been dreaming in great detail about the best Sunbeam Lotus he could build since about the time George Michael left Wham! That just left the significant task of turning the sorry bodyshell into something worth rebuilding.
As rough as a badger’s…
Chris played a hands-on role throughout the restoration, sharing in the work with his team of mechanics. From October 2016 when the car arrived, they dismantled the car, eventually revealing what 35 years of damp had done to the steel.
‘It was pretty rough,’ says Chris. ‘Starting at the front, the headlamp boxes and the tops of the front wings had rusted. Then there was the front scuttle, which had cork between two layers of steel – it gets wet and you can imagine what happens.’
The door bottoms were both frilled by corrosion and the jacking boxes inside each sill had rotted. The channel below the tailgate and the spare wheel well were perforated too, while the wheelarch returns showed a Sunbeam-lotus specific problem.
‘The lip inside the wheelarch often got folded to give tyre clearance,’ says Chris. ‘It happened on the rear with this car after it was painted, so the paint cracks and the rot begins.’
The repairs to the body were to be handled by another long-time collaborator with Tolman Motorsport, Phil Ducker of Normandales in Daventry. Normandales got the shell blasted too, and found they had more work than anticipated when it returned.
‘It was cracked around the seat mounts and the pedal box,’ says Ducker. ‘It had clearly been rallied at some point. That was going to mean quite extensive repairs; it also looked like we’d need to remake the bottoms of the A-pillars and some chassis leg sections.’ It wasn’t ideal, but the car’s owner had an ace up his sleeve. ‘My business is sheet metal fabrication,’ he says. ‘I knew that lots of other Sunbeam Lotus bodyshells would need similar repairs, so I arranged to reproduce some jacking boxes and headlamp support boxes to factory specifications – even down to the location and number of the spot welds.’
Up from rock bottom
Precision-made repair sections from Shaw Sheet Metals speeded things up a bit, but there was still a sizeable task ahead. Phil Ducker recounts how it was done, as near as possible to factory specification, ‘We removed those cracked and rusted floors, and repaired and spot-welded them back into position. New sills were fitted using the factory welds, and we replaced the front wings with some new old-stock items that Chris had sourced.’
Normandales did indeed have to re-fabricate the base of the A-pillars and let in some new steel to weakened chassis legs, as well as fitting new door bottoms – spare original doors in good condition are pretty much extinct. Repairs to the front scuttle were less extensive than feared, but the cracks around the pedal box in the bulkhead meant another bout of drilling out spot-welds, creating a repair panel and spotting it back in. Phil Ducker’s crew also replaced the rear wheelarches and lower rear quarters with repair sections Chris Tolman had discovered.
With the welding complete, paint preparation was the next stage, all the work taking place under one roof at Normandales.
‘We protected every cavity with a product called Keyfoss,’ says Phil. ‘It’s a black etch primer. The rest of the bodyshell was epoxy primed and we applied a 3M sealer on the underside. Once the upper surfaces were flatted, it’s the same process we use every time – we applied a base coat which was finished with 320-grit and then a coat of colour went on, which was nibbed with 600-grit. More colour follows that, and if we don’t see any flaws, it’s ready for lacquer. Otherwise we can go back a stage and re-flat.’
This relatively quick and efficient approach is made possible by a technology Phil has chosen for the wide variety of work his firm is required to do – from Formula One cars to MOD contracts.
‘We use heated nitrogen as a propellant instead of air,’ he says. ‘It travels through the gun better, it’s less draggy and you get better paint transference. That means we can use less paint to