Opening excerpt from an article on a Plus 2S/130 in April ‘88 issue of Supercar Classics.
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“So lonely ‘twas that God himself scarce seemed there to be... “ is one of the few lines of Eng Lit to have stayed in my mind these 20-odd years. I don’t know the circumstances in which they entered Coleridge’s head, but I clearly remember the time they resurfaced in mine. Loneliness, let me tell you, is a Lotus Elan, Rotoflex driveshaft coupling sheared, by the side of the road between Bayonne and Bordeaux. At three in the morning. Neither God nor anyone else came by until daybreak.
As usual, on these occasions, I fell to cursing Colin Chapman for building cars at once so irresistible and insufferable, then sank back into a troubled sleep, keenly aware that locating a new Rotoflex in Aquitaine would not be the work of a moment. Thereafter I carried spares, but the trick thing about Elans was that they always knew, always broke, what you didn’t have with you.
And yet I owned three of the things. For some years I did without peace of mind, never began a journey with any surety of finishing it. For this was a Lotus, possessed of all the glories and foibles of Chapman’s race cars, and there was enough of the man’s genius in the Elan to make it incomparably the most satisfying genuine sports car of its time. What else did you buy in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s? MGB? TR6? Oh please...
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