The Lotus Type 66 Is a Modern-Day Can-Am Car

Lotus never competed in the original Can-Am championship, but it wanted to. Now, a mere 53 years late, the British sports-car company is set to produce a limited run of the car it started work on for one of the most spectacular race series of all time, but which never got built. The Lotus 66 has just been unveiled Friday at the The Quail during Monterey Car Week. Only 10 of these track-only specials will be built, with each carrying a seven-figure pricetag.

The Canadian-American Challenge Cup, invariably abbreviated to Can-Am, was first run in 1966 and was about as close to ‘anything goes’ racing as top flight motorsport has got. Run under Group 7 Sportscar regulations, Can-Am cars needed to have wheels enclosed by bodywork and meet dimensions. But there was no stipulation for minimum weight and both engine choice and aerodynamics were effectively unrestricted. Although it was a North American series, British outfits Lola and McLaren dominated Can-Am’s early years - in 1969 McLaren won every single round, Bruce McLaren taking six victories and Denny Hulme five.

Lotus’s entrepreneurial boss Colin Chapman was keen to have a slice of this pie and told Team designer Geoff Ferris to come up with a proposal for a car to compete in the series. Work on this started in September 1969, and although the project never advanced enough to get allocated a type number, it is likely it would have become the Lotus Type 66 had it continued. Ferris’s early sketches featured a raised ‘narcell’ - like a Formula 1 cockpit - to smooth airflow around the driver, plus a very long tail. The original proposal was for a stilted wing raised high above the back of the car to sit in clean airflow. But when Lotus learned that Can-Am was set to follow F1’s lead in banning such wings, it was redesigned to have a lower full-width element integrated into the rear bodywork. Power was undecided, but the Lotus would probably have followed the rest of the Can-Am pack with a Chevrolet V-8 engine.

Lotus’s Can-Am project never went further than these early proposals, the team working flat-out to run its other racing programs from Formula 1 to touring cars. But the original sketches were saved and, a few years ago, rediscovered in a box of microfilm by Classic Team Lotus. At which point CTL’s boss, and Colin Chapman’s son, Clive Chapman persuaded Lotus Cars’ head of design, Russell Carr, to turn these into 3D renderings. That project led ultimately to the car you see here.