Hello everyone!
Together with my father I'm starting up the restoration of a Lotus Europa, an october 1970 S2 to be exact. It's a car with a bit of personaly history to it. My dad has known this car since the 1970s. It was owned by the older, English cousin of one of his best friends, they frequently visited the area my dad grew up in. The cousin had this blue Lotus Europa, and a rather attractive girlfriend. You can imagine what impression this made on my dad in his teenage years!
Fast forward 25 years, and my dad gets the opportunity to buy this exact car, from the same owner! The car got parked up somewhere in late 70s/early 80s because of a leaking wind screen. Typical case of 'we'll get to that, it's next on the list!'...
We live in the south of The Netherlands, and picked up car in England the early 2000s. I was still a teenager and my dad didn't know that much about classic cars. We started working on the car, but never got past stripping it. After that, life kinda happened. My dad owned a driving Europa S2 for a while and now has an Elan+2. I've been driving Rover P6s since I turned 18.
We're at the point where we
really want to pick up the restoration. We know our way around a spanner after years of tinkering and feel like it's time for this car to live again. It'll be a project of many years to come, but it will happen!
The car is a bit of an odball. It's RHD, but has the US-spec sidemarker. Checking the VIN number has taught us that there was a batch of Europas, that was ordered for the US market. The order got cancelled, after which the cars were retrofitted with RHD at the factory and sold in the UK. It's a batch of 174 cars, which makes it quite unique even in Lotus terms.
Before you look at the pictures, I have one quite important question.
Where can I find the chassis number?! The location on the body and behind the windshield is obvious. I've read that the chassis number is on top of the right-side rear chassis leg. My dad remembers this from his other Europa too, but we just can't seem to spot it... Are there other places it might be? Or do we have to carefully start removing layers of rust...?
The first few photos are from it's home in England, the later ones are how it sits now.