Extremely Cool Lotus Cortina

The 1965 Ford Lotus Cortina Mk I Saloon was the first time a legal race car was made in a production class

by Thor Thorson

Ford's 1960s profile-raising competition program included recruiting Lotus boss Colin Chapman to give the new Cortina a sporting makeover. Chapman's brief was to develop a Group 2 competition version; Lotus would then build the 1,000 cars required for homologation.

Launched in 1963, the Lotus Cortina featured the Elan's Ford-based, DOHC, 1.6-liter engine in the two-door bodyshell. Lotus Cortinas dominated saloon racing's 2-liter class, often challenging for outright honors. Works cars were driven by Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Peter Arundell, and Jackie Ickx, while Sir John Whitmore, driving an Alan Mann-entered Lotus Cortina, was European Touring Car champion in 1965.

The Lotus Cortina offered here is one of the original Works racing saloons campaigned during the mid-1960s by legendary Formula One World Champion Jim Clark, while touring car champions Sir John Whitmore and Jack Sears also competed in this same car. It was raced by the Works-backed Team Lotus during 1965 and comes with its factory record card recording events entered, dates, drivers, engines fitted, failures, and comments. During 1965, the car was used in the British saloon car championship, being driven by Jack Sears at Goodwood and Snetterton (twice), Jim Clark at Silverstone and Brands Hatch, and Sir John Whitmore at Oulton Park.

Offered with Swansea V5 registration document and letters of authentication from the Lotus Cortina Register, "JTW 498C" represents a unique opportunity to acquire an historic racing saloon associated with three great motor racing champions, including the legendary Jim Clark.

The SCM Analysis

This car sold for $281,808 at the Bonhams Olympia Auction, which took place on December 3, 2007.

Look, guys, I love Lotus Cortinas at least as much as the next guy, but this is insane! This car sold for twice the published estimate, which was twice what I would consider fair market for a garden-variety Lotus Cortina. Is the racing history associated with the car worth that much these days, and if so, why? I guess that's pretty much what I'm here to discuss today.

There is no doubt that Lotus Cortinas (Lotus Type 28, if you want to be twiddly about it) are extremely cool cars. They have been described as the world's first homologation specials -- cars designed and produced with the specific intent of making a car legal to race in a production class. It all started when Ford, with a very long history of building fundamentally stodgy cars, decided to upgrade its image and embraced the "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday" philosophy.

Caprino? That means goat dung

The Cortina debuted in 1962 as English Ford's first modern (unibody) car design. It was a light, stiff chassis with contemporary suspension and featured a wonderfully robust five-bearing evolution of their "Kent" 4-cylinder engine. It was the perfect base for a sporting sedan/racer conversion. (As a fun aside, the Cortina was named after the site of the Winter Olympics. It was originally to have been called the "Caprino" until somebody realized that the word meant "goat dung" in Italian.) By the early '60s, Colin Chapman and Lotus were well established as a premier English producer of sports and racing cars, and were developing a twin-cam cylinder head for Ford's Kent engine block (to replace the expensive and unreliable Coventry Climax engine). When Ford decided to create a performance variant of the Cortina, Chapman was the logical person to call. Chapman loved the idea, not least because his company could use the production line business (30 cars per week), and he set about designing the changes that would convert a clunky sedan into a sporting proposition. Obviously, the twin-cam engine went in, along with the close-ratio Lotus Elan transmission. Aluminum door, boot, and bonnet skins replaced steel units, the front suspension was dropped and stiffened, and then Chapman took on the rear suspension. Not content with simple leaf springs on the live axle, he created a complicated coil spring system with an alloy differential carrier to save weight. The whole rear suspension looked very elegant; we'll talk later about how well it worked.