An elite memento

It turns out that Octane is not only a rather splendid monthly magazine, but also a demon matchmaker that played a small yet pivotal cameo in reuniting this Lotus Elite with its original owner, the late Max Mosley, recently lost to cancer. That’s Max Mosley the lawyer turned racer turned F1 maven, team owner, FOCA rep and long-serving FIA president. And a car safety pioneer, let’s not forget.

With no hint of his future career in F1, Mosley was a 21-year-old trainee barrister in Manchester when, entranced by the engineering and looks of the first full-sized glassfibre monocoque car, he bought into that state-of-the-art dream in 1961. In what turned out to be the final interview he gave before his death on 23 May this year, he told Octane: ‘I found its advanced technology of the monocoque construction combined with a very advanced Coventry Climax engine so appealing, although it was way beyond my means financially. My only previous car had been a bug-eye Sprite, so it was quite a revelation.’

The young Mosley was an aspiring racer and sourced a lot of advice and help, not from Colin Chapman, whom he never met at that time, but Lotus’s Rodney Bloor, himself an accomplished wheelman. This included building the Elite from the kit of parts that Mosley had bought for a purchase tax-dodging £1299 when a ‘built’ car was a hefty £1951. ‘Rodney was very helpful and gave good advice about my