Lotus Europa Community

Yep.
The fundamental forces in play in my super simple pic are gravity (red arrow) and the reaction from the spring (green arrow) – Isaac Newton's third law.
The core principal of the upright's function is that the spring acts on a lower pivot point and, thus, aways maintains a leverage advantage.

My slide-rule is in for service but someone smarter than me could calculate the leverage effect.
As a side note, the spring is laid over somewhat, so the actual spring force at the lower pivot will be something less.

So, if Colin walked into his engineers office with this upright, how would they stop it from rotating clockwise?
It's getting on for summer here, but to avoid a cold backside in the Northern hemisphere, I'd sacrifice a cornflakes packet to some cardboard aided design.

Rather than sitting in a cold garage floor, how about this....

I think of it as in the image below.  This is the S2 layout whereas the TC has the damper/lower link on the same bolt, but it's close enough.

The weight of the car is the blue line through the spring/damper.  The reaction from the ground through the tyre is yellow arrow A, which is outboard from the lower mount of the damper which forms a pivot point. If there were no top link/driveshaft then the wheel would pivot and the top go inwards as shown on yellow arrow B. This means the driveshaft is always going to be in compression as long as there's a ground reaction at A. The more the force on the wheel, the more compression on the driveshaft and in theory the lower link should go in tension.

Even when you're cornering fast and the tyres sliding, unless you lift the opposite wheel clear of the ground, there's always going to be some compression in the driveshaft. If you do manage to corner fast enough to lift the opposite wheel then yes, the driveshaft could go into tension but I think the load would only be at most the weight of the wheel trying to go into positive camber

for more data points, 0234 has those plates riveted in, no holes, and cracks across the sill(both sides)as Klaus mentioned ... 0576 has no holes and no plates, and no cracks... both have the "swales" My S1 is talking about

Thank you for your sympathies.  If it makes you feel better, my plate light is off center as well.  About 1" to the right.

The perfectionist in me agrees with you, that would drive me crazy …. kind of like the non centered license plate lights on a Twin Cam