Lotus Seven
When life serves you lemons and a sour taste in your mouth, build a Lotus
From a busy high-rise office to a damp, chilly underground garage doesn’t seem like a positive step in life to most people, but as PC readers you probably spend any day behind a desk wishing you were tending your classic. So when I recently accepted redundancy from my day job, my first thoughts were whether I could afford to take a few months off and get stuck into a proper project.
I’d been hankering for some time for an early Lotus Seven but had neither the time to restore a wreck, nor the money to buy a good one. My Lotus obsession had worsened after recently moving house to very near the original Hornsey ‘factory’ – in reality some sheds behind a pub – where Colin Chapman first launched the marque with a band of loyal and often unpaid helpers. Sadly only the boxy showroom building remains as part of the timber yard now on the site, but this was still enough to get me devouring books on Lotus history and daydreaming.
Trigger’s broom
So within days of my redundancy settlement arriving, I was looking for a suitable Lotus. Of the early cars, Series 1 and 2 Sevens are the only ones remotely in my price range, but even they are rare, expensive and vary a lot in originality and provenance. If contemplating a Seven, it’s essential to know what you are buying – like many tube-framed competition cars, as chassis and engine wear out, they can become like ‘Trigger’s broom’. Worse still, I came across attempts to pass off newer Caterhams and Westfields as Lotus-built cars, and instances of more than one claimant to a particular chassis number. John Watson, the Seven Registrar of the Historic Lotus Register, has been an invaluable source of advice and helped to fill in the background of several cars I considered, saving me from making expensive mistakes.
But with limited time before I would need to get a new job,
‘Could I track down all the parts that would have come with the Fifties kit?
I was slowly losing hope of finding the right car: cheap and in need of work, but having some legitimate provenance.
Finally, having been too slow off the mark to snag an S2 project advertised in the club magazine, I decided to try a different tack and take on a bigger challenge.
Until very recently, it was common to replace a rotten or crashed Seven chassis with a new one rather than repair it. I knew that Mike Brotherwood, a long-time Lotus restoration specialist and parts supplier, had recently moved premises and was looking to free up some space, and had an original S1 chassis that had been discarded from a previous restoration.
If I started out with this, could I relive the experience of a Fifties Lotus customer and build a car from the ground up with my limited time and budget? Could I track down all the parts that would have come in a kit nearly 60 years earlier?
A visit to Mike to see what other parts he had stashed away resulted in a deal for the chassis with bodywork panels, brakes, interior and axle with suspension pieces to follow, and soon the chassis was strapped to the top of my dad’s old Mondeo and heading back from deepest Wales to my South London workshop.
Assemble it in 12 hours…
The first job was to make a frame to sit the chassis on and measure the position of the suspension pick-up points to check it was straight. Laying cardboard over the floor and carefully marking out key points with a plumbline allayed any fears – all was within a few millimeters of where it should be. However, two of the vertical tubes at the front had crash repair damage, and there was a little rust on the passenger side. Ideally, I would replace the tubes, but this would be impossible without stripping the aluminium skins from the chassis, and I didn’t have the skill to make new ones. I settled for heating and straightening the tubes and welding short reinforcing strips over the lower section.
Adding strips to the thin box section was tricky but the result doesn’t look out of place among the 1959 gas welding on the tubes. Otherwise the chassis needs little work, and on the face of it, I’ve ended up with nearly all the major parts of the car. It should be an easy project, but in reality, the specialised nature of these Sevens, the rarity of some of the parts, and my budget is going to mean a lot more work than that.
Lotus may have told its customers they could build a kit in a little as 12 hours, but that was with every last piece included and a healthy dose of creative licence.