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Saturday, 28 March 2020

Lotus Cortina

I took this photograph at Foulstons chicane at Oulton Park during the CSCC Pre '65 Saloon Car Challenge Race at the Jaguar Drivers' Club's Cheshire Cats' Trophy Meeting in April 1987.
There were ten Lotus Cortinas in this race, together with four Ford Cortina GTs and I'm having some difficulty trying to identify the cars shown here. The second car is that of Colin Woodcock and the fourth car Simon Sayward's,but I don't know who was driving the car between those two. The car in the lead appears to be Chris Boon's, which the programme of the event shows as the only red Lotus Cortina in the race. Colin Chapman's collaboration with Ford started in 1961 when he commissioned Harry Mundy to design a twin-cam version of the Ford Kent engine. It first appeared in a Lotus 23 in 1962 and was used in the Lotus Elan which was introduced that year. Ford then approached Colin Chapman to suggest that Lotus should fit this engine to 1,000 examples of the Ford Cortina so that they could homologated for Group 2 racing. Between 1963 and 1966 3,306 examples of the Mark 1 Lotus Cortina were produced.

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