Ronnie Peterson was one of my F1 heroes during my early teenage years when I started to take an interest in motorsport. Winner of 10 Grands Prix out of 123 contested, he was one of the best drivers never to win a World Championship, an opportunity tragically taken from him when he was killed in a first-lap melée at the start of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1978 when driving for John Player Team Lotus, the racing team with which he is most associated.
The ”Super Swede” drove 59 times for Colin Chapman, winning all but one of his ten GP’s at the wheel of a Lotus (the other win was for March). Chapman clearly valued Peterson highly and gave him more than one road car as a token of his admiration and appreciation, and one of those is our Prime Find this week.
The Lotus Elite name goes back to the exceptionally pretty 1957 Type 14, a small, lightweight (what Colin Chapman design wasn’t lightweight?) two-seater which featured very advanced fibreglass monocoque construction, combining lightness with stiffness. The original Elite competed successfully on the track, notably at Le Mans where it won its class no fewer than half a dozen times, and since only just over a thousand were made, it is highly prized today, with good examples fetching strong money on the rare occasions they come up for sale.; there are two restored Type 14’s for sale in the UK as I write, both asking almost £80,000.
Production of the Type 14 ceased in 1963, and it wasn’t until 1974 that Lotus put the Elite name on another car, but this was a very different Elite to the original. Like it’s forebear, it featured a fibreglass body, but that was where the similarities largely ended.
Where the 1957 car had delicate, softly rounded lines, the new Elite – or Type 75 – was as wedge-shaped as it could be, all straight lines and angles and with pop-up headlights. In this it shared a styling philosophy with the likes of the Lamborghini Urraco, Maserati Khamsin and De Tomaso Pantera and it clearly influenced the TVR Tasmin which followed six years later. Although priced at the time to compete with the Alfa Romeo Montreal and Citroën SM, the Lotus is nowhere near as valuable today as any of the aforementioned except perhaps the TVR.
It was also a lot bigger, offering four-seats in a shooting-brake shaped body à la Reliant GTE, the Hethel car featuring a big glass tailgate not dissimilar to that on the Tamworth-built GTE and Volvo 1800ES. The engine was a 1973cc in-line four-cylinder that developed 155bhp; combined with a drag co-efficient of a claimed 0.30 (remarkably, the Type 14 beat this by 0.01), this was enough to propel the car to a maximum speed of just over 125mph/200kmh, and a 0-60mph/97kmh time one-tenth of a second over eight.
The Type 75 was available in four versions – the base 501, the 502 with added aircon, the 503 with aircon and power-steering, and the 504 with automatic transmission. The Giugiaro-designed interior was a far cry from the sparsely-furnished Type 14, with a full set of dials and switches set in the walnut-veneered dash, four supportive bucket seats covered in brushed nylon, and optional aircon and power steering, making this a GT rather than a sports car.
The Elite was also the base for the 2+2 fastback Eclat, launched in 1975, the bottom half of which was identical to the Elite.
2,535 examples of the Elite were built between 1974 and 1982, with the Type 83 or Mark 2 version built from 1980 to ‘82 with a slightly larger 2.2 litre engine that pushed out the same bhp but more torque and a Getrag 265 ‘box replaced the old BMC unit. The previously vacuum-operated pop-up headlights were now electrically operated, and there were some minor body modifications.
With a price tag starting at £5,749 when new, the Elite was the world’s most expensive 4-cylinder car at the time. Values today, though, are generally well below those of the Elan and particularly the original Elite, and despite their rarity (fewer than one hundred on the road in the UK ) and status as the last of the Chapman-developed Lotuses, they rarely cost more than £10,000, and values as low as this, while making the acquisition of an Elite attainable to many, also make restoration financially not worthwhile, so buyers need to source an example that’s as sound as possible.
When testing a 503 in March 1975, Motor Sport magazine was very impressed with the finish – “magnificent” – and the “beautifully executed” interior, but especially so by the car’s handling, praising it as “one of the finest-handling production cars in the world, better than a Porsche and almost on a par with the Dino” – high praise indeed – while at the same time wishing for more power to exploit this ability. Despite all this praise, however, they felt the car was significantly over-priced, and poor sales would bear this out over time.
CAR magazine tested the 502 version alongside the Citroën SM and Porsche 911 2.7 – both 6-cylinder cars – in September 1974. While also having good things to say about the styling, fit and finish, ride and roadholding, they criticised the car’s performance on the road (as opposed to its on-paper figures) as “gutless and feeble with no impression of any power” – strong words. The 911 left the Lotus in the dust, and even the much bigger and heavier SM outperformed it. Again, this would be addressed – at least in part – with the increased engine capacity and torque of the Type 83. Of course, the 911 is at best a 2+2, so not an option if you needed to go any distance four-up.
Let’s take a look at our Prime Find, which comes under the hammer with Historics at their Royal Ascot auction on March 12th. It’s only the third Elite to come into their saleroom, so not a car that often comes up for auction and indeed, there is no other Elite on sale in the UK as I write. However, what makes this Elite special is its ownership history, which takes us back to the beginning of this piece, for it’s first owner was none other than the great Ronnie Peterson.
This bright yellow 1974 Elite 502 was presented to the Swede by Chapman himself on June 25th 1974, and there are photographs of the two of them included in the history file. The interior is in Oatmeal with Lotus badges on the seat backs, and is in generally good order, according to the auctioneers, as is the paintwork, though it’s hard to confirm from the photographs. It’s been with the vendor for 15 years but seems to have been used only lightly in recent times.
Ordinarily, we’d expect such an Elite to come in comfortably under our self-imposed £20k budget, and the last two Elites sold by Historics – both 504’s – fetched £8,845 and £8400 in 2015 and 2016 respectively. This car is offered with No Reserve, but surely its provenance will make a difference. I don’t know how useful an indicator this is, but in 2016 Historics sold another ex-Peterson Lotus, this time a 1972 Elan 2S, for a rather staggering £72,800, although it was chassis Nr.1, which may have made an additional difference. I have no idea whether the provenance of this Elite will result in a similarly high price being achieved, but will watch with interest.
You can see the full lot entry – from which we have borrowed a few photographs – here, and as usual, if you are interested in bidding for this Lotus, we recommend arranging prior inspection if possible.
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us be inspired by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk