What the previous owner had apparently done when he owned the car....

The car came with a book of photographs and some spare parts. Some of the photos have been reproduced below so I could sort of work out what had been 'played with' in the car's history. Unfortunately, not one photo had a picture of a calender in the background, so I had no timeframe to look at. (If this had been a Bond movie there would have been something that, under a phenomenal degree of magnification allowed by a piece of jewellery that I just happened to be wearing, would have told me not only the dates of the modifications, but the names, addresses and private telephone numbers of everyone involved, together with their current whereabouts. Mind you, I would also have had rocket launchers, submarine capability and a beautiful women as standard. Oh well, you can't win them all.)

At some point a previous owner had modified the car - obviously the whole thing had been apart and benefitted from a chassis re-spray. As the car I had bought had been lying doing nothing for well over a year, some of this work had been undone, but at least I knew that the car was basically sound - the most important thing, I felt. A Lotus contact told me of a very effective (and extremely messy) way of rust proofing which I have included in the technical help secion.

After all, look at the picture above. You have a car that is designed to float round the most evil of corners and whose engine is designed to be most effective at high revs (the torque curve between 4 500 r.p.m. and 6 500 r.p.m. is flat !) If all you have between you and the outside world are 3 bits of angle iron, you don't really want them to be corroding !!

The D.P.O. also liked his machine to have power - the V8 is, I believe, a small Rover. Having done a bit of research into the V8 engines, it's an interesting modification. The sheer stomp of the Rover/Buick lump completely changes the feel of the Lotus - all the torque is low down in the Rover, whereas all the torque in the Lotus engine is above 4 000 r.p.m. I'll cover this in more depth in my V8 section....