Forty years after it was built, the Lotus Mk2 was found in a shed. Jeremy Coulter investigates
Persistence pays, it seems. Lotus enthusiast Nigel Halliday first heard a rumour of the existence of Lotus Mk2 ten years ago. A friend in the Berkeley Enthusiasts' Club had said in passing that he knew someone (who knew someone) who knew an old man who had a couple of old Lotuses sitting in a shed at the bottom of his garden.
Nigel made a mental note of this news but didn't hold out too much hope of the rumour actually being true. In the meantime he pursued another pet project, which was to track down Lotus Number One, if that car still existed. His extensive researches led him to the conclusion that it didn't, so he turned his mind to the search for the second car that Colin Chapman built.
The mysterious 'old man', who shall remain anonymous, was eventually tracked down and did indeed own up to having a couple of cars in his shed. However he wasn't interested in selling them or even letting anyone have a look at them. But Nigel persisted, keeping in touch with 'Mr X' and convincing him that he was indeed an enthusiast, and not a speculator seeking to turn a quick profit from an interesting (and undoubtedly valuable) old car.
Contact was maintained right through to 1988, by which time the owner had at last come round to thinking that he might be interested in parting with his cars. By then Nigel Halliday had actually seen them and was sure that they were both very interesting indeed. Then fate took a remarkable twist. Halliday is not one of the most common English surnames, but another enthusiast, Martyn Halliday; also turned out to be on the trail of one of the cars. In fact he was one jump ahead of Nigel as he had visited the by-now somewhat confused owner and reached an agreement to buy 'the green one', having not really paid much attention to the 'the red one'.
When Nigel next came to visit Mr X, he found him still somewhat bemused by the surfeit of Hallidays, but agreed to sell Nigel the red car. Nigel exhumed it from the shed and trailered it home in May this year.
"Really it was the red one I wanted," says Nigel, "although, of course, it would have been nice to have had both." His inspection of both cars had convinced him that he had chanced upon not only the Lotus Mk2, but also the Mk4, both key elements in the remarkable story of the founding and growth of Colin Chapman's Lotus marque.
In fact, the Lotus Mk2 was the first Lotus ever to be sold because Chapman found a buyer for the Lotus Mk1 only after the Mk2 had been sold to Stirling Moss's uncle, Mike Lawson. Having built the first Lotus special around an Austin Seven chassis in 1947, the Mk2 developed Chapman' ideas further. Working in his spare time in his own garage in time off from RAF National Service, Chapman based his second car around a much-improved 'boxed' Austin chassis. The diminutive car was fitted with a tweaked sidevalve Ford engine and clothed in simple lightweight aluminium panels. Already the lines of the later Lotus Sixes and Sevens were becoming evident in the shape of the nosecone and the bonnet line.
Chapman drove the Mk2 in off-road trials events but extended his sporting activities to take in speed trials and proper races. The most celebrated race, described in most Lotus books was his classic win in the Scratch race at the 1950 Eight Clubs meeting at Silverstone, where he beat Dudley Gahagan's Bugatti T37 after a good dice.
While Chapman busied himself building a Mk3 Lotus, the Mk2 was sold to Mike Lawson who ran it successfully in trials in 1952. The car was then sold to. Eric Beaumont in Ireland who owned it until 1957. It was around this time that the car appeared in the film Brothers-in-Law, starring Ian Carmichael and Nicholas Parsons. In the film the car was seen by the roadside being given a coat of red paint, the remains of which it would still seem to wear today. Its film days over, the Mk2 was sold to a poultry farmer who appears to have used it as everyday transport until selling it to Mr X in 1966. The car then enjoyed 22 years of remarkably dry storage in a tumbledown shed.
The Mk4 Lotus was the car built for Michael Lawson after he had run the Mk2 for a couple of seasons. It was built specifically as a trials machine and followed the principles established with the Mk2 although the suspension was more sophisticated and the body rather sleeker. Michael Lawson ran the car until 1954, whence it passed through many hands until joining the Mk2 in Mr X's hands in the Seventies. On the way it was apparently offered to the National Motor Museum who decided it was not a car for them.
Of the pair the Mk4 has survived in the better shape with its Aquaplane-head Ford engine still in place. The Mk2 on the other hand had ended up with the engine out and with various bits and pieces spread over the shed floor. However, the correctly serial-numbered Ford 10 engine with higher-compression Ford 8 cylinder head was stored next to the car albeit with a hole in the block where a rod had come through. Even the special Chapman devised sandwich plate to mate an Austin gearbox to the Ford engine was among the collection of bits.
As of June 1989, Martyn Halliday is occupying himself with the resurrection of the Mk4 which he plans to use in Classic Trials, while Nigel Halliday is considering just how to tackle the 'restoration' of the Mk2. It's a thorny problem because it would be so easy to over-restore what was always a fairly tatty machine, even when new. Most of the bodywork has been chopped about in the car's 40 years, so the question is should he restore it as it is or seek to return it to the original, but surely constantly changing Chapman condition? Regardless of what may ultimately happen to the Mk2, Nigel's priority is to fit the recently acquired working sidevalve engine and get the car into basic running condition as soon as possible, in time to be displayed at Lotus 89, at Donington Park in August.
The story of the survival and discovery, of both these Historic cars is quite remarkable. One wonders just how many other gems still lurk in barns and sheds the world over. Let's just hope that they keep on turning up and finding their way into the hands of true enthusiasts.