Mr. Nutter’s Cave of Wonders

This month’s test drive of the new Lotus Evora (see Product Review, pg 78) got me thinking about my own experience as a Lotus owner. Or rather, the strange path I took to become a Lotus owner.

It was the early days of the Internet as a tool to find racecars for sale. There wasn’t much in the way of dedicated sales web sites like now, but if you trolled the various vintage racing bulletin boards, every now and again a treasure could be unearthed. One day an email from one of the groups I subscribed binged on my desktop, “For sale: 1969 Lotus Formula 4, $5,000,” along with a telephone area code near where I live. I had been racing a string of production cars to that point and had been itching to find a purpose-built, racecar—ideally a formula car—that I could move up to. Perhaps more importantly, it needed to be cheap and, therefore, it needed to be a basketcase. A Lotus for $5000? It had to be a basketcase, but the ad didn’t make much sense, as there was no “Lotus Formula 4.” Weird. But maybe the seller meant Formula Ford? Ford kinda sounds like four? Either way,  like Pavlov’s dog my salivary glands started working overtime, I had to check this out.