Groovy, baby!

Gary Thomas wanted to make his Lotus race car more distinctive – so he turned it into the ‘Psychedelic Seven’

instructor for the hillclimb school at Shelsley Walsh, my original motorsport discipline was circuit racing, which I practised in the early-to-mid 1980s. Then, as happens to a lot of people, I got married, sold the race car, the trailer and so on – but I always knew that I would get back into motor sport one day. I did so via sprinting and hillclimbing, starting out with my mum’s old Mazda MX-5 and ending up with a couple of Force single-seaters, with which I took class wins in the British Hillclimb Championship and British Sprint Championship.

I still had unfinished business with circuit racing, however, and I chose Historics on the basis that driving standards tend to be better than in moderns! Classic car drivers are usually owner-drivers, and they haven’t learned on a Playstation or by watching the antics of British Touring Car entrants. You might also expect drivers in Historics to be more ‘mature’ than in other kinds of racing, but in fact we have some really good young drivers in the series that I mostly race in, 70s Road Sports, one of the Historic Sports Car Club’s championships.

I bought my Seven Series 4 about 2½ years ago. It’s the one with the ‘challenging’ looks – and I had actually been after a Series 2 at the time – but it seems to have had an upsurge in popularity recently. Maybe it was the paintjob that swayed me, although don’t tell anyone that I bought a car on the basis of its colour! It was registered in November 1970, so it’s quite an early one. While I was racing at Oulton Park recently, a guy came up to me in the paddock and said ‘I built that car!’ A friend of his had owned it, dismantled it and left it in bits, so told this chap he could have it, and he resprayed it in its current pistachio green.

Engine, gearbox and diff’ have all been rebuilt, and my neighbour who helps me a lot on the car says it has fought us all the way. The engine is a Ford 1600 crossflow and, for the class I race in, Class D for cars 1501-2000cc, I have to use the single twin-choke Weber; I can’t run twin carbs without going up to the next class, which would put me in with the Twin Cams. Gearbox is a four-speeder, as it was back in the day, and I would guess the car’s top speed is about 120mph – but the Seven was always hampered by its aerodynamics.

As a fan of the psychedelic-liveried Porsche 917s, I decided to do something similar on the Seven. The swirly shapes on the 917s didn’t really suit the boxy outline of the S4, however, so I came up with something a bit different. I drew the designs on a computer and then cut the vinyl graphics myself, and the car is now known as the Psychedelic Seven.

I’ve had a few decent results with the Lotus. At the end of last season, I won a race at Lydden Hill and, at the exact moment the car crossed the line, the diff ’ blew up. I like to think Colin Chapman would have approved.