I have been circling around the idea of having a Lotus Elite of the M50/Type 75 generation for ages. It ticked a few boxes: I have never owned a Lotus, and I didnʼt have anything even approximating to a sports car in my fleet.
Time was you could buy one for £1500 on the road, but that will only get you a ropey project today. Good ones arenʼt parted with very often, and the chances of finding a car that doesnʼt need its rusty chassis replacing appear to be slim, unless you go for a much rarer (but much-improved) S2.
Post-1981, the Lotus four-seater concept came good as the more robust but less interesting-looking Excel. A fair few of these have now donated their galvanised chassis and more reliable drivetrains and suspension to give a new lease of life to the older model, mainly thanks to Mike Taylor of Lotusbits. Mike has been the saviour of the Elite over the past 20 years, and it was my occasional visits to his parts and restoration emporium near Rugby that inspired me to own an example myself.
I have in fact bought two: the first was found on eBay in 2021, languishing in a garden in Stafford (you could even see it on Google Maps), and I spent an afternoon helping Mike extract it from six inches of mud without snapping the chassis in two – and all to the accompaniment of the shrill tones of a young lady giving her (presumably ex-) boyfriend a two-hour tongue-lashing on the phone. The car itself was complete but scruffy, with a damp interior. It came with some interesting spares, but the assumption was it needed everything before it was going to see the road again.
Had funds allowed I would have pressed the button on getting Mike to do a full chassis swap on the red 503 from Stafford. Itʼs not an expensive job in the grand scheme of things, but no matter how I juggled the figures, I had to concede it was beyond my means.
Mike quickly found a buyer for the project car, and I put the notion to one side, half hoping I might unearth an Elite that was already up and together, or one that I could somehow get back on the road fairly inexpensively.
Meanwhile, by quite some coincidence, a close neighbour mentioned that her husband had an old Lotus in the garage, but my initial hopes were dashed when it turned out he had gifted it to his daughter: I was allowed to look but not buy, because the daughter was going to “do it up”.
I gave the lady Mikeʼs number, but then six months later I got a call asking if Iʼd like to
