Looking for Lotus 110s,
Tony Wybrott has made it his mission in life to track down all the Lotus 110 bikes ever made. CW headed to Brands Hatch to find out why
ome people like to dabble in genealogy, but Tony Wybrott’s ancestry project is something far more exotic. The ‘family’ the New Zealand engineer is trying to trace are 263 Lotus type 110 bikes he helped create while working at DPS Composites, the Surrey firm that built the prototypes and the first batch for Lotus in 1993. Since he started his search two years ago Wybrott has already got 67 in his register just through word of mouth and social media.
At the Lotus Festival at Brands Hatch last month Wybrott and his newly formed Lotus 110 (pronounced ‘one-ten’) Club exhibited 12 bikes, which Wybrott thinks is the biggest gathering of the iconic machines since Chris Boardman and the GAN team rode them for their final season in 1995.
“There’s quite a few GAN ones here,” says Wybrott, straining to be heard above the V8 rather than pedal-powered Lotuses that are screaming down the Brabham Straight on the other side of the grandstand. “They all come from people who worked at Lotus. After they’d finished the 1995 season they all came back to Lotus and nobody could decide what to do with them.”
One of those former workers at Lotus HQ in Hethel, Norfolk, is Nick Adams, whose 110 had belonged to Boardman and that Adams had restored and rebuilt in as
close to 1994 spec as possible in time for the festival. “The two-year supply contract was up and they came back from GAN in a big cardboard box and sat in the corner of the office for a week and we all stared at them,” remembers Adams. “Then we asked what was happening with them because I fancied one and they said, ‘Well, we’re just going to scrap them.’ I said to Artioli [Romano Artioli, Lotus chairman 1993-1996], ‘Can we not buy them?’ He said, ‘Well, how much?’ I thought, go cheap, and said ‘£100?’ And he went, ‘OK.’ And that was that. They were all sold for £100 each.
“Being the shy, retiring type I barged my way to the front of the queue and made sure I got the one with Boardman’s name on it.”
Another Lotus in the line-up is completely unrestored, bearing the name of GAN rider Pascal Lance as well as the scars of almost a decade of subsequent use as a hack bike. “My aunt and uncle worked at Lotus,” says its owner, Matt Purdon. “My aunt bought this one, gave it to my dad and he commuted to work on it for eight years. He rode it from Southend to Canvey Island every day, rain or shine, rode it through the woods, just treated it like a bike. So now it makes my bedroom look very cool. It’s a family heirloom. I absolutely love it.”
Other Lotuses on the stand, belonging to Dan Sadler and Michael Porter, are still in use in domestic time trials. The monocoque design, although banned in professional cycling following the UCI’S Lugano Charter of 1996, is still legal in events run under Cycling Time Trials rules and regulations in Britain. And it was only relatively recently that the Lotus 110’s aerodynamic performance was finally surpassed by the top Uci-legal diamondshaped time trial frames.