Was the Lotus Cortina the only Lotus-Ford collaboration...?
We all know (and love) the iconic Lotus Cortina, but did you know Ford almost built a Lotus Corsair too…?
Once, just once, Ford Motorsport indulged itself by entering special Corsairs for the Spa-Sofia-Liege rally of 1964. That was the year in which Boreham took advantage of the very relaxed regulations to blending the best of the still-evolving Cortina and Lotus-Cortina chassis with the Corsair’s structure. This was straightforward because the steel platform/underbody/main chassis structure of the Corsair was a longer wheelbase version of that of the Cortina - the Corsairs wheelbase was 101in, the Cortina used 98in.
Boreham therefore built two heavy-duty Corsairs, powering them both with mildly-tuned versions of the still-new Lotus-Cortina twin-cam engine (the power output of these engines was never revealed). These, therefore, became the only official ‘LotusCorsairs’ ever to be seen in public (other engineering prototypes were built, but never shown ....), and they only appeared on this one International event.
Number-plate crunchers will want to know that these cars were ETW 542B and ETW 543B, and although they started life as two-door 1500GTs when originally assembled at Halewood, they were rapidly turned into ‘works’ rally cars, utilising every still-developing feature of the team’s Cortina GTs, but fitted with 1.6-litre Lotus-Cortinatwin-overhead cam engines and gearboxes.
The engines were by no means highly tuned, not only to ensure that they would keep going for more than 3,500 miles, but because the quality of available petrol on this rally in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria was still awful, to say the least. To save weight, LotusCortina front quarter bumpers replaced the normal full-width bumper of the Corsair road cars, while a simplified front grille
was fitted to allow as much cooling air as possible to enter the engine bay.
ETW 542B, a right-hand-drive car, was allocated to David Seigle-Morris and Tony Nash, a combination which started well, but which suddenly disappeared just as the cars entered Bulgaria, approaching Sofia where there would be a brief pause for a meal (but no night halt!). The official reason for retirement was that the car had a burst tyre, and subsequently over-turned, the result being that it was badly damaged and could not continue in the event. Although it was eventually retrieved, and later returned to the UK, it was never used again by the factory team.
The second of the ‘works’ Lotus-Corsairs (ETW 543B) was an almost identicallyspecified ‘clone’ of ETW 542B, but this car was eliminated from the 1964 Liege at an early stage during the passage of Yugoslavia, with a mechanical problem (not specified in detail), and was not seen again as a ‘works’ car in International motorsport.
In 1965, however, it was re-furbished, then loaned to team-driver David Seigle-Morris, for him to tackle whichever British club and national events took his fancy. There were no particular successes in this programme, and both cars, it seems, were later scrapped.
But why build such cars in the first place? Surely a suitable strengthened LotusCortina (with leaf spring rear suspension, that is ….), would have been a stronger, lighter and more suitable prospect ? Well, to quote one famous but fictional political figure in House of Cards: “You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment…” Although all the important Boreham characters involved have now passed on, it is now known that this is what they wanted to do, but…
The fact is that Ford’s PR and Publicity guru, Walter Hayes (who controlled big budgets, including that of the Motorsport Department) was keen to boost the new Corsair’s reputation in any way possible, and was bolstered up by an otherwise standard car’s 100mph-plus record-breaking run at Monza. Not only that, but the prestige link between Ford and Lotus was burgeoning at the time, and the outcome of this thinking was easy to understand – if it worked in the Liege, why not produce a civilised road-car version too?
Ford’s Engineering and Product Planning bosses, though, were not as impressed. The reliability of the Lotus twin-cam engine was still troublesome, the Corsair was already selling well, thank you, and in any case, there was a new-generation of dramatically cheaper V4 and V6 engines coming along too. With the 2.0-litre Corsair V4 2000E engine producing 97bhp, and the untuned Lotus engine only 105bhp, the performance differences were minor. And so, another high-performance ‘fast Ford’ project bit the dust…