Un – temperamental power, brilliant handling in an affordable road car. The Result: More fun per dollar than an E-Type.
That’s how the much revered lotus elan was summed up by Aust sports car world magazine motoring journalists back in the 1960s when they evaluated 100 Years Of Sporting Cars – and then chose The Top Ten.
There probably wont be any surprises when you learn which one of the top ten was chosen as the best of the sixties sports cars?
No prizes for guessing that it was the indomitable Lotus elan, the lightweight lotus elan that provided simply amazing performance for the price. The late Colin Chapman had an uncanny ability to make mundane materials work smarter as well as just a little bit harder.
What made the elan a milestone performance car of the sixties was the way it packaged a cutting edge sheet metal folded & fabricated backbone chassis design which was coupled with a very willing & powerful twin cam engine which provided affordable, reliable and entertaining motoring.
Remember to, that the 1960′s was the decade of the E-type Jaguar & big banger exotic sports cars, yet none of these so called exotics came anywhere near the lotus elan for delivering maximum driving fun per dollar.
A willing twin cam engine coupled to an ultra close ratio four speed gearbox, a lightweight, yet torsionally ridged backbone chassis clothed in an equally lightweight fibreglass body provided incredible performance from such a small package.
The Chapman designed front & rear soft sprung independent suspension provided sure footed handling and frightening road adhesion and grip, all the more remarkable when you consider that the standard tyres were of 70 series mounted on 4.5″ rims.
The remarkable design parameters of the lotus elan resulted in a car that delivered outstanding performance, it was, and still is a car that is capable of delivering very rapid point to point travel times without any need to explore it’s top speed, nor will you need to exceed the given road speed limits, there are few cars of the sixties era that provide driving enjoyment quite like the lotus elan is capable of.
Today, the remainder of the surviving lotus élan’s on the road are mostly owned by people who are passionate about the marque, they maintain them and even refine the cars to improve the general day to day driving enjoyment even more.
Production numbers of the lotus elan hovered around the twelve thousand mark, but the total number in existence today may well be much less than that, perhaps that augers well for the present day owners who know & appreciate the real value of owning such a magnificent 1960′s performance car, as more & more classic sports motoring enthusiasts wake up to what these brilliant lotus cars represent in motoring terms, the market values will continue to rise as the last surviving cars are snapped up by current and new lotus enthusiasts alike. In this over regulated, dumbed down world of today, car enthusiasts around the world will never see another sports machine quite like the lotus elan.
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best of the sixties, design parameters, remarkable design, top speed
