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Anybody got a Lotus Elan 26R

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Hi there O.S.I. I guess you have the only 26R on the board for sure. We had a chance to buy one some years back but the car was a wreck and at the time was too much money. Do you race your R or is a street demon?

Welcome to the board.. The Lotus section is not overly active, but overall there are lots of great threads in amongst the rest of the board.

What year is your car? What's done to it? Put a pic or two of it in the gallery..

Mark
 
I have a 1964 Lotus Elan 26r (26-R-36)seris one my grandfather raced it to a pacific coast Championship an d raced against many notalbe names. It has been in the family siting in are garage and we started restoring it a year ago.
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Hmm A year ago eh? Sounds like you have about a year and a half to go.. Usually takes about 2 to 3 years for a full at home resto.
 
<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by osi26r:
Its not a full on restoration but we have a ways to


O.S.I. Has arrived
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<hr></blockquote>

Got pictures?
 
The one that Dave Bean races was pulled out of a basement garage on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. It had sat in there for years. Someone told Tom Beauchamp about it, and Tom bought it, then Dave Bean bought it from him. Dave told me that his old race car already had a lor of the "R" pieces of that very same "R", and they are all reunited now. It is a pretty fast Elan.
 
I'm guessing this is it? (Your email didn't have any text, just this picture, so I'm assuming this is the car we're discussing?"

PS: You can upload this yourself to our Members Gallery! (In the Lotus section of course
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)

Basil

Lotus01.jpg


[ 10-04-2003: Message edited by: Basil ]</p>
 
Wow! Thats quite a cool package to work on..

Congrats and good luck!

JB
 
If any of you guys know or could estimate...What would it could it cost to make that car a reliable runner?

A few grand or tens of thousands?

Thanks

JB
 
20 grand sounds like an great deal for such a cool car!

Good luck

JB
 
The Lotus you are building certainly will be a rare bred ....

what special plans do you have for this fine automobile ....

If you could tell us what you have planned that would be cool.

Thanks

JB
 
One thing where going to do is put the race track placks that he won our competed in on the dashI'll keep you posted on the progress and hopefully more pictures


O.S.I. Has Arrived
 
Actually if you have the good parts still with the carit costs about the same to restore as a regular Elan. I have way more than $20,000 US in our Elan.. Mind you there isn't a part of the car that has been overlooked or done to " good enough " standard.

Cool wheels on yours though..I like..
 
I hope you will pardon my son Paul's (aka osi26r) youthful exuberance. His excitement about the Elan is not wholly unjustified, though. He has done a lot of good work on the car, including finding out a lot of things on the internet I never knew. I had always thought I just had this old Elan in the garage that was raced in the SCCA of the mid 60s. I had no idea it was a "26R", or what a 26R was. All my attempts to find parts were failures and progress was non-existant. The internet changed all that. Paul found a number of places on the internet that had parts, including Dave Bean. A couple of e-mails later I discovered that not only did Dave have a 26R, but that it was originally raced by a guy whose name I new very well, Bill Young. Bill Young won third place in points for the west coast division in 1965. Joe Ward (Paul's grandpa) was second in points behind Dick Jones of Fresno. All three drivers were eligible to race for the national title at Daytona in Florida. During the shipment of my dad's Elan to Florida the hub was damaged and he wasn't able to qualify. Bill Young, who had a similar Elan back in LA wired his shop, had them remove the hub from his older car and send it to Florida - True sportsmanship. The hub made it to Florida in time for my dad to race on Sunday, but he had to start dead last(27th position) because he couldn't run the qualifying races. By the end of the race, Dad had made it all the way to 3rd place against the top drivers in the country. Who won? Well, you know. Bill Young.
Paul also found a video on the internet that had some footage of our Elan. www.motorsportcollector.com. If you go to that site and page down a little ways you will find a section that has a link for "videos". There, you will find the video "1965 Times Grand Prix". The video was actually taken from an ABC Sunday sports show. I thought I would buy the video hoping that maybe there might be some footage of Joe Ward in our Elan. Sure enough, there are about 6 different clips of the car, mostly getting passed by the likes of Jim Clark in his Lotus 40, or Hap Sharp's Chaparral. He had qualified 41st for a starting field of 40 and it looked like he wouldn't be in the race. Then, Jim Hall's Chaparral's suspension broke and moved Joe Ward up to the last spot on the grid. The only other car in the race that even resembled a street car was a factory backed 427 Cobra. Joe Ward finished 3rd in the under 2 liter class behind a pair of Lotus 23s and 17th over all.
The video, with shipping and all, is about $31.
 
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