During the 1960's through to the late seventies sports cars were designed by engineers with one thing in mind, to provide high erformance with good handling & brakes, good looks, and an exciting driving experience with lots of grin factor...read, pure unadulterated driving enjoyment behind the wheel.

Sure, there are some great cars around today that still provide driver enjoyment, but many cars are being redesigned, and over engineered in such a way that the old enjoyment factor is being taken out of the automobile, even some high performance marques have computerised management systems installed to stop you from getting a little out of shape while cornering, which means you don't have to apply opposite lock any more... heaven forbid...where's the fun in that.

What ever happened to the car control skills learnt by sports drivers in days gone by? And what happened to the comunication between you and your car felt by the sensations you often felt through the seat of

your pants.... now that's what real driving was once all about.

In the sixties there were many different makes of sports cars on the road, the most common and affordable was the MG, and the square rigger type TC - TD - & TF and the later MGA & MGB were considered fun sports cars of the time, they were not particularly fast, but gave the driver enormous enjoyment along with wind in the hair motoring. There were also lots of big Austin Healeys...the Bull dog of English sports cars and ever so popular with the bigger budget drivers. Triumph TR2, 3 & 4s were also plentiful on the roads, they enjoyed a great following by many sports car enthusiasts.

If you had a lust for very fast sports cars you would naturally look at buying a Jaguar E-type, or a Ferrari, Porsche, Morgan Plus 8, etc.

But there was a small sports car designed by a happy go lucky Englishmen with a degree in aeronautical engineering who started designing and building unique, agile little sports cars in his spare time. It was not long before these little cars were finding success on the racetracks, and they continued to challenge and embarrass the more established marques, racing fraternity people of the day were all-aghast and wanted to know the name of the builder of these funny little racecars called Lotus.

As the years went by, the Lotus name become synonymous with numerous World Championship F1 victories on many of the world's great race circuits. Such was Colin Chapman's Design Genius and uncanny knack of selecting great drivers such as the late Jim Clark who drove the Lotus cars to a number of F1 victories.

The magnificent Lotus