It’s that time of the year when folks grab their kaftans and wellies, fire up the old VW Camper Van and head for Somerset, although these days it is just as likely to be a helicopter ride and corporate hospitality that takes you to Glastonbury Festival. Back in the sixties it was all so much more free and easy though – it was the time of peace, love and Flower Power.

Lotus were in on the scene too; the company’s larger-than-life Sales Manager Graham Arnold was never one short of an idea for a stunt or two and in 1967 he came up with the idea of converting a Lotus 51 Formula Ford for road use. The Formula Ford class was itself new on the scene that year, having been devised by Brands Hatch boss John Webb as a low-cost entry-level form of motor racing. Equipped with a standard Cortina GT 1500cc engine, it was a stipulation that cars should cost no more than £1,000 to purchase. Lotus Components were quick off the mark with the Type 51, which actually had its origins in the Type 22 Formula Junior and Type 31 Formula 3 cars, so not a lot was expended on design work! Conveniently Lotus pitched the car in at £995 and Colin Chapman, ever one to spot a potential set about trying to sell fleets of cars to the racing schools.

Folklore will tell you that the very first Formula Ford race took place at Brands Hatch on 2nd July 1967 when former soldier Ray Allan drove Motor Racing Stables’ Lotus to victory ahead of the similar car driven by Malcolm Payne on behalf of rival educational establishment, the Jim Russell Racing Drivers’ School, from Snetterton. However some three weeks before that, on 11th June, a Single Seater race at Snetterton included a Formula Ford class packed out with JRRDS school cars, so should we really call that the first Formula Ford race? I have the programme and pictures to prove it but unfortunately cannot tell you whom the winner was.

Formula Ford racing was an immediate success and with the annual Earl’s Court Motor Show looming up and Graham Arnold in cahoots with Nick Brittan, a Formula Ford racer and promoter, hatched a plan to create a road-going Lotus Formula Ford as a publicity stunt. Construction & Use regulations were probably a little more lax in 1967 than they would be today but it proved surprisingly easy to make the tube-frame racer road legal. Designated the 51R,headlights were fitted to comply with the regulation minimum 24-inches above the ground, together with the rest of the legal lighting requirements, flared fibreglass wings were fitted, leading to the ‘Mantis’ nickname it was accorded, and there was even a horn. About the only thing Plod found to criticise was the angle of the front number plate.

Motor Show organisers the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders (SMMT) were a little sniffy about what they let into their shows in those days and racing cars were certainly taboo, however parking the flower power-bedecked machine outside of Earl’s Court did the trick and it attracted a lot of interest, Lotus Cars (Sales) reporting that orders taken at the Show were almost 100% up on the previous years’ event. Not too many of them were 51R’s though, despite a stated optimism that up to fifty units could be sold to “hippies” in the following year since the 51R was not required to comply with new U.S. safety regulations or pollution requirements. Asking price, incidentally, was £1,085 in kit form, so that was just £90 for the street-legal kit.

A road test published in ‘Lotus – the magazine of the marque’ serves to highlight just how different attitudes were forty years ago, and I can do no better than quote –

“Handling, brakes and acceleration are in a class of their own. There just isn’t a corner made that can’t be taken 20mph faster than a conventional road car could possibly manage. The small size of the 51R combined with its lowness is calculated to cause a dose of the dual personalities. The one supremely confident, the other frightened to death by one’s vulnerability. Cars come round corners and just don’t see you, people turn right as you overtake and your head hits them on the elbow! Finally the car is very dangerous, it causes accidents all the time as people turn their heads suddenly and stare in utter disbelief. The score to date is two motor cyclists who rode into each other, a van which drove into a parked Rolls-Royce, and a pedestrian who walked into a lamppost.”

If the prospect of all those accidents didn’t put you off, you would have found the performance figures interesting; 0-60mph was given as 5.2-seconds, with 17 seconds needed to get to ‘the ton’, and a top speed of 120mph. Arnold himself wrote that test so there may have been a certain amount of embellishment. Nick Brittan tested it for Car  magazine when he claims to have achieved 103mph flat-out in top gear somewhere in London – “but I’m not telling you where.”  He also allegedly managed to spin it in the Hyde Park Underpass. Happy days…

The 51R did finally make it onto a show stand in January 1968, however, attracting attention to Lotus’s pitch at the London Racing Car Show – and they sold one to a customer from the USA! Lotus Components had their hands full meeting the demand for Formula Fords at the time and didn’t exactly rush into the fiddly job of building the road-legal car until a hurry-up call came from a personal friend of the customer – Henry Ford, no less!

The customer shipped the car out to the Bahamas to use in the annual speed week competitions, but he also used it during the day for trips to the tennis club and the like. Probably not quite what Graham Arnold had in mind as a cash-strapped Formula Ford racer, but there you go! Our man was obviously well-connected, as amongst his house guests who are said to have driven the 51R in Nassau was Graham Hill.

Eventually the car, chassis no. 51A/FF/129, returned to Britain in 1990 and was fully restored to replicate the original road car, down to the registration plate NVF 1F, and has seen some road use. Most recently it came under the hammer at Bonham’s Hendon auction on 20th April, being knocked down for £24,150 including buyer’s premium – quite a step up from the original list price!

The Lotus 51R, then, was not a big success as a road car but it did go on to provide the inspiration for Gordon Murray’s Rocket much later. On track it was a different matter however, with Lotus Components believed to have delivered 218 Formula Fords before the design gave way to the much more modern-looking ‘wedge’ Type 61 in 1969. Lotus themselves even established a Lotus Formula Ford Trophy for the 1968 season, with a prize fund totalling £3000. With no less than 30 events counting towards the championship (racers were busy boys then!) the overall champion could look forward to picking up £500 – might not sound much now, but that was half the price of a new car. Bob Ellice was the lucky man in a season that was ultimately dominated by rising star Tim Schenken’s Merlyn. So mercurial was the Aussie’s ascendance that one pundit tipped him for World Champion in 1970 and Prime Minister the year after. Admittedly there were lots of hallucinatory substances floating around in the Flower Power era, which just about takes us back to where we started…

John Elwin
June 2009