I Hope My Third Time Owning a Lotus Seven Works Out Better Than the First Two

From Road & Track

(From the February 1988 issue of Road & Track)

According to George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. True enough, I guess. A high school friend of mine forgot about the Civil War during an American History exam and had to take the whole course over. Most of us learn our lessons, though. For instance, no archduke named Francis Ferdinand in his right mind would think of vacationing in Serajevo, and luxury steamship lines the world over continue to steer clear of names like Lusitania and Titanic. People remember more than Santayana gives them credit for. Except in my case.

Only yesterday I called up my friend Dudley Davis, who lives in Wisconsin, and said I would buy his Lotus Super Seven. Yep. After weeks of lost sleep, agonizing indecision, consorting with loan sharks and finger tapping on my pocket calculator, I caved in and agreed to buy the car. My third Lotus Seven.

For those who don't know what a Lotus Seven is, either because they are too young or have had their attention distracted by cars with windows and stuff, the Lotus Seven is a spindly front-engine 2-seater sports car designed for club racing by Colin Chapman in the late Fifties. It has a steel-tube frame, fiberglass clam­ shell fenders and aluminum bodywork, and is one of the most stripped-down, bare bones, no frills, hair shirt, reductionist distillations of the sports car concept ever allowed on public roads and race tracks. Some people think it is an ugly car and claim it looks like a praying mantis. I happen to think it's beautiful, but then I think Bob Dylan sings better than Wayne Newton, so to each his own. If people want to be dead wrong, that's their business.

It's a little misleading to say this is my third Lotus Seven, sort of like an unpublished author talking about his third novel. The first two attempts at ownership were not what you'd call resoundingly successful.

I bought the first one about 15 years ago from an SCCA racer named Dean Rhode, in Appleton, Wisconsin. Dean had a working F Production Lotus, but the one I bought from him was an old parts car he'd dragged home from Texas. It was a $2500 basket case, a pure project car for which Dean made no promises or apologies. It was essentially a collection of old Lotus parts, some of which were loosely bolted, or wired, to an old Lotus frame that was buried in the back of Dean's garage, under a Weber grill and some broken-down 10-speed bicycles of the sort you get free with a Zenith from Crazy Eddy's.

I hauled the Seven home, bolted on four equal-sized wheels and tires and observed that only two of the tires actually touched the ground at any one time, unless you rocked the car onto the other two. I then removed the old Lotus parts and the aluminum skin and found that the frame was bent like a banana.

Being too poor to handle an extensive frame restoration, I sold the car to my equally poor but more fanatical pal, Bruce Livermore. Bruce restored the car beautifully, lavishing two years and thousands of dollars on it, then crashed while racing at Indianapolis Raceway Park. His rafters are now full of old Lotus parts and the frame is presently sitting in his garage, hidden behind the Weber grill and the 10-speed bikes, bent like a banana.

My next venture with Chapman's orphan child came 10 years later, when we were living in California. I saw an ad in the Sunday Los Angeles Times for a street-legal $4500 Seven in Long Beach. After a short test drive, I bought the car and drove it down the Pacific Coast Highway in a glorious cloud of oil smoke, my hair blowing straight forward because of the odd wind flow in the cockpit, road seams dealing hammer blows to my spinal column. When I got home, my friend Steve Kimball came over for a test ride. The starter fell apart, so I gave him a push start and the left axle broke. That afternoon I began taking the car apart, filling the rafters with old Lotus parts. By midnight, I'd discovered the frame was bent like a banana.

This time I restored and re-skinned the frame myself, thinking to make an SCCA D Production racing car out of it. About that time, however, the SCCA stuck the car in GT-3, added 100 lb to the legal weight and sleeved down its carburetors, to punish it (said we Lotus buffs) for winning the occasional race against Porsches, Mazdas and Datsuns that were 20 years newer and vastly more sophisticated and expensive. As racing was my main objective, I decided to sell the car and buy a Formula Ford.

The rebuilt frame and rafterload of old Lotus parts was bought by a man named Greg Emmett. Greg, a local volunteer fireman, stored the frame and a few of the parts in a barn not far from his home. The rest of the old Lotus parts he stored in the rafters of his garage. One day he answered a volunteer fire alarm only to discover it was his own barn that was burning to the ground. When the ashes settled, he recovered the charred frame with the aluminum melted off. The frame is now in his garage, behind the Weber grill and the 10-speed bikes. Banana flambé.

So I don't know if I can honestly say I'm buying my third Lotus Seven. Let's just say that two others have passed through my hands. When I pick this one up from Dudley Davis, the plan is to restore it for use in both SCCA E Production racing (carburetion and weight permitting) and for the occasional vintage race. When I get it out on the track, though, I'm going to go easy at first. Lotus Sevens are rather fragile when they come in contact with Armco, heavier (i.e., all) cars and other objects denser than a sack of feathers. If you aren't careful, you can end up with the rafters full of old Lotus parts and your frame bent just like a banana.

Purely as a precaution, I'm getting rid of the Weber grill and the 10-speed bikes before the car arrives. I don't mind repeating the past, but I hate the word condemned.