1969 Lotus Elan - Jay Leno's Garage

uh if you've been to this website before you know one of my favorite designers is gordon murray he designed the iconic uh mclaren f1 as well as the 775 pound rocket almost as fast as the mclaren f1 a car that influenced a lot on gordon murray. the

lotus

elan

eh, i had heard a lot about

lotus

saloons, i knew about them, but when i was a kid, a lotus alarm was a pretty expensive car, almost as expensive as a corvette, in fact, probably a little more expensive and when you're 18 . 19, 20 years old, a corvette with a big engine and 300 horsepower and it is much more attractive than a small English sports car with about 126 horsepower, so I never entered the lotto hall, but as As time went on they became more and more legendary. and uh, gordon moriar described it as his favorite car, so i said, you know, i like everything else that gordon has done, i want to go back and find out what influenced him and you know something, once again, he was right, it's one of the most fantastic sports. cars of all time I found a tremendous buy one lotus get one free and I was looking for a lotus and I couldn't find one and then in a week I found two uh this was a car I saw this is a

1969

lotus salon I saw this car, uh oh, about 10 years ago.

The original owner acquired it when he was 19 years old. He said, "If I want to sell that car, let me know and, unfortunately, about 10 years went by and I got it." a call from his wife and he had passed away uh and she said that she knew that I always liked this car and that I wanted to buy it and I said yes, I went to look at it, what had happened was that I had taken it apart. They had taken the head off to do some work on it, unfortunately he got sick and passed away, so I bought the car from him and we rebuilt it with the help of Jim, you know, Jim Hall, our head builder here, Jim is an expert on these lotus

elan

s now i myself was smiling when people talk about modern and light sports cars the Carrera gt 3200 pounds the corvette zr1 3200 pounds even the mclaren f1 was the lightest car of its time at 25 2600 pounds this one 1580 pounds uh, quite amazing it still has a radio and a heater and a top and power windows this is the car that inspired the miata uh you know you put a miata next to this it looks like a peterbilt pickup it's much smaller but surprisingly im six feet tall it fits in it , there's plenty of room, it's almost the perfect sports car, great gas mileage, there aren't many cars that can handle this on a windy road, especially if you know what you're doing and don't want to do it.

I hit, but an SUV in this thing, okay, it's all fiberglass, okay, it's not really a safety car, but if you consider safety as being able to avoid traffic and get in and out quickly and, ya you know, take corners quickly without tipping over, so maybe I guess it's a safe car I'm just making excuses you know you have a lot of handcuffs look at this so you have to say these things pick it up it just comes off just take it off you put it to the side you know america we had the 283 chevy 327 chevy the 265 with the 289 ford any of those small block engines uh this was the small block engine for england this is the equivalent of the small block chevy power plant this is the one that everyone uploaded is the one they made all the performance parts for stock these had exactly 1558 cc double overhead cam eight valves cast iron block weber stock carburetors power was about 126 horsepower torque was 113 foot-pounds rear wheel drive four speed uh independent uh front suspension with coil springs, the front disc brakes are 241 millimeters in the rear with 254 maximum speed.

The new one was about 120 miles per hour and you can get a lot of horsepower out of these cars. This is Jim has modified it. We're getting to about uh, about. what 1700 cc something like 1700 cc is about 160 horsepower originally the car had a generator that weighed about 12 pounds there's probably more than that probably 15 pounds probably 15 pounds uh if you have one of these cars or even a mg or a English car you can take a modern alternator out of it, one of those little Chevys, any of those modern cars you see there weighs about four pounds, two or three times more than the production, you save weight and there is no loss, I mean, it's a way excellent.

Also, it's an alternator, not a generator, so you're constantly generating current. We've put headers and a big aluminum radiator on it because, making more horsepower and being a British car, they always like to overheat. This does not require overheating. many modifications, special swirl pots, what does a swirl pot do, water circulates through a motor and air can get trapped in it, so in the swirl pot it comes out of the motor, spins it before entering the radiator and that allows the Jay likes to drive this car so hard that he wanted to lose oil, so this little gadget here is an air-oil separator that separates the oil that would come out of the crankcase breather. and he puts it back in the crankcase the engine breathes through this tube it enters under a deflector the oil that is there falls to the bottom and only vapors come out the superior weber carburetors that you mentioned here this is a unique option for Europe for this car We had to make a mold on this air box made of fiberglass because they can't be made here in the United States.

Special camshafts. Special connecting rods. Special crank. And it's a really sweet engine. Dave Bean Engineering supplied a lot of the parts for us just go on the web google Lotus and Dave Bean and you will see they have everything for these cars and I am always grateful for specialist manufacturers or aftermarket people who keep it up because There are many of these cars on the market. road, but to keep them on the road you need those types of people when we got the car we ended up going through the transmission, the rear axle, the axles, the suspension, we did pretty much all the safety related things that a car could need because I want to be As safe as it was when it was new, right?

And the cool thing about this car is that it's one owner and it even has the original paint, so that's pretty cool, it's a well taken care of car, well let's get to it next. door, we'll put it on the shelf and show you what makes it such a great color. I have always loved this badge. Remember they won Indy with Jim Clark. Big deal after that, they were all rear engined and there were no more front engined cars. After that, here is the lotus key and also the Achilles heel, some would say is this steel frame.

I mean, the only steel you have is here. Everything on the outside is just fiberglass and all kinds of bolts. This is where all your electrical problems come from. also because it's hard to get a good ground on these things, but as you can see, Jim did a wonderful job here, this is a car that gets used quite a bit, it's not a show car, it's a driver, so it's pretty clean here below. Well, for a driver, it's important for me to point out that we have not restored this car, this is pretty much how we got it, with the exception that we did all the safety stuff and the engine, yes, the engine was shot, but other than that it was a well maintained original car and we also changed the rear end here uh this is another key point now there are purists who say oh they love rubber donuts because they slide and you see where they are going to leave you Wow but if you're putting 40 or 50 extra horsepower on it, you want to convert it to this now it's a little bit heavier but it's a lot stronger and obviously a lot safer.

Jim explains what we did here: the original driveshafts if we called them. rubber donuts, they're rotoflex joints and there were two, just like these axles have two CV joints like a modern front wheel drive car would have, so we put new axles in the rear, new axles on the outboard side, new brake discs and these CV joint axles the original axles had these rotoflex joints if you looked very closely you would see that they are all cracked the rubber is ruined and your day goes very bad if one of these joints explodes while you are driving at 100 and it really is just rubber, you turn a corner, it just flexes in and out and like we said, some people liked it because you could feel when they were about to let go, but they let go, but like you say, especially in California, you know that you go. an elastic band in california with the air here you put it on a table you come back here you pick it up it literally falls apart in your hand and the air here tends to devour all the rubber it makes it very corrosive so that's why you want to make the shaft heavier, I mean, it's heavier, but it's much safer.

It's interesting to me that these A-arms made on this car that is original, yes we put new bushings on them, but that's how the factory made them right. They were not cheap cars to build because a lot of labor went into building them properly and Lotus was not a successful car company in terms of profits until the elan came out. This is the car that made them somewhat successful and the first one. car that they could actually mass produce, at least according to the English production stand, and how many they built, maybe three thousand in total, but it really is an iconic sports car, some people think it's the best English sports car they've ever seen. made known when you went back to the 60's. and everything else was a heavy metal chassis, body on chassis, this was innovative technology, something really experimental, fascinating, no one was building anything like this when this car came out, there was no nothing equivalent, it was the best handling and one of the quickest from zero to 60 in less than seven seconds, which doesn't sound fast now, but you know, if you bought a 66 uh satellite hemi, it was about the same from zero to 60.

Yeah, they were fast, they were fast and the other thing they did in this car. What preceded it was the Lotus elite, and they attempted to make a full fiberglass car, which caused major headaches. When they came up with this steel backbone frame, it made it easier for them to build and maintain. Right now we have some images. that we filmed on the uh at least on the engine restoration of this car and let's take a look at that now as I've always said every time you buy a car with a rebuilt engine that means you have to build it again uh This is a rebuilt engine that supposedly the bottom was done and everything needed was advanced, some other things were put on it, well obviously that's not true and Jim is a lotus guy for a long time, this is his engine, it's been working in these since, uh, since, uh, well. since you were my age, yeah, yeah, practically, yeah, yeah, jim has completely overhauled the engine of our '69, just tell them what you've done here, uh, you're looking at it right now, it's just almost finished, very, very close to finishing, we say.

We put a crank on it so we could get a little more displacement, we put high compression pistons on it, they're forged pistons, we put on rods and this engine could now rev to 9500 rpm and stay together and it will be the final fine. -The adjustment when you install camshafts on an engine is called setting the cam timing and we use a dial indicator, we use a degree wheel and we use little offset bushings and we move everything back and forth until we get the cam timing cam, so that's just perfect, uh, this was all over, Jim Clark lifted them up in the curtains, certainly, the elan, well, this engine never ran at Indy, right?

Wasn't it so small? That's too small, yes they actually used the block as a testbed to develop their dfv racing engine that eventually became the dfx indy engine though, so you know there's a link below. Finally I'll finish bolting everything together and then we'll take it to an engine dyno and run it on a dyno for about an hour. Half a day because Jay likes to go fast and they don't trust me to train him. He doesn't like to break things, so we'll do it on a dyno and find out exactly how much horsepower is needed. and then when you do it for a road test you know you're making 163 horsepower, it makes a great sound and they're actually quite fast, like a lot of the 60's British products there are a lot of reliability issues.

Americans are much harsher on cars in English work. You know, the Eagles didn't have the big roads that we had, where you were speeding all the time, five six thousand dollars for hours and hours on the freeways, and you know. things would come loose and there are electrical problems, but once you figure them out, boy, it's an amazing car, nothing like it even today, I mean this car weighs 1550 pounds, that's nothing, it's half of what weighs a corvette. You already know the entire generation of drivers who don't now. I don't really understand what a light sports car is without power steering or anything I love themtraditional Smith gauges you have a radio you have a heater you have power windows and a car like this 60 feels like 100 unlike a lot of modern cars where 100 feels like 60.

So you get a real feeling of driving, even though there are a lot of cars in the period they had more horsepower, not many had this good power to weight ratio and that's what it is, how many horsepower versus how many. a lot of pounds you're pushing, all the options are available for these cars, you can make them even lighter, you can take another hundreds of pounds off of this stuff, plus they make five and six speed transmissions so these cars can stay competitive long after from which they were built. to design, you know, when you drive a modern sports car like a light bar or even a corvette, they're wide cars, you take up your entire lane, this car you can literally slide into your own lane and still have plenty of room.

I know it's cliché to say it handles like a kart, but it handles like a kart. I know they can be a little temperamental, the nice thing is that when they break, you can really fix it yourself and when you work on the car yourself, when you make it work, there is a great satisfaction because you know as much as I like drive modern cars like Audi R8 and all. You can't do anything to that thing, it's hard to establish a connection with the car, whereas with this thing, when it breaks down on the side of the road and you get out and fix it and leave, you feel like you've done it. something that is pretty cool, I think I forgot to mention the pop-up headlights which were very important in the 60's.

The good thing about cars in this era is that they are eminently rebuildable, you can rebuild them over and over again. Again, you know the modern cars that are intended to be somewhat biodegradable or have electronic parts that will soon be obsolete. I don't know what, I don't know how you can restore them. This car I have kept the road worthy of the lotus you saw. We are going to improve the white ones that are next to them so that they have a slightly higher performance. This one has 160 hearts. I'm hoping to get 210 to 220 out of the other one, but this is the everyday road car, it's fantastic.

I mean, I know the car has a radio, but why are you listening to it when you can listen to this? It's almost hard for me to convey how much fun this car is to drive. I understand why this is Gordon Murray's favorite car. This car was the inspiration for the mclaren f1 and the rocket is simply a fantastic sports car, light, fast and agile, and if you make some sensible modifications to it, such as a high performance aluminum radiator, it will never overheat and is extremely reliable Since we built this car, I have had no problems with it.

I've used it quite a bit as a daily driver due to safety standards and things like they'll never be able to make a car as light as this again, but they're still reasonably priced if you can find one. for 20-25k get it you will have a lifetime of fun and it will last forever. I know what you're thinking, but will it exhaust you? Let's find out. That's all. See you next week.