The Streetable Track Car Everyone Loves

You know this car. It's a Birkin. No, wait, a Westfield? A Donkervoort? It's a Locust...... a Tornado?

HISTORY & CRAFT

9/21/20265 min read

You know this car. It's a Birkin. No, wait, a Westfield? A Donkervoort? It's a Locust...... a Tornado? At this point it's safest to say this vehicle goes by quite a lot of names.

The first, was the Lotus Seven.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential kit cars ever produced, the Seven came directly from the mind of Lotus founder Colin Chapman in 1957. It was everything Chapman seemed to believe a sports car ought to be: light, simple, purposeful, and entirely uninterested in unnecessary decoration. Built from a narrow tubular chassis, aluminum bodywork, a four-cylinder engine and just enough of everything else to make it legal.

1958 Magazine Advertisement of the Lotus Seven

The Early Years

Edward Lewis at the Brighton Speed Trial 7th September 1957.

The Series 1 was sold from 1957 to 1960, primarily as a kit. It used a tubular spaceframe chassis beneath a body influenced by the earlier Lotus Six, with buyers able to choose from a 1.2 liter Ford engine, a BMC A-Series, or Coventry Climax FWA.

And it didn't take long for the Seven to prove tat it wasn't merely a cheap road car.

Its first competitive outing came at the Brighton Speed Trials in September 1957, only months after the car had been introduced. It was an appropriate beginning. The Seven wasn't designed to dominate a particular class with some exotic engineering trick, just fast enough to embarrass considerably more expensive machinery.

The Series 2 arrived in 1960 and continued that formula with a number of changes aimed at making the Seven easier to build and more capable. The aluminum nose and wings were replaced with fiberglass, a newly marketed material for commercial applications. The chassis was revised, and increasingly powerful Ford engines became available.

By now, the Seven was becoming something of a fixture in club racing. Its competition career would eventually become almost impossible to separate from its road-going identity. The same car you could build in your garage could be driven to the circuit, raced, and then driven home again.

So why build? why not buy it assembled like 90% of cars?

Racing, Kits, and Tax

It wasn't to save on production costs, no, It was something far more purposeful. To stick it to the tax man, and subsequently, save the buyer money.

Under Britain’s Purchase Tax system at the time, an assembled motor car brought with it a considerably larger tax bill than a kit. As a result, Lotus offered the Seven as a collection of components rather than a completed automobile. There was an important catch, however: the kit could not include assembly instructions. In lieu of this, Lotus, included disassembly instructions.

Lotus Seven Series 2 at an Auto Show

A Lasting Influence

From 1957 to 1973, Lotus would build four distinct versions of the Seven. Then, when Lotus decided it was finished with the car, somebody else decided they weren’t.

You’ve seen one, I’ll wager. At a track day, where it has arrived wearing one of its many replica names, or more likely as a Caterham, revving its engine to the heavens and disappearing around the next corner before you had the chance to fully study it.

And if you’re like the majority of the afflicted population, you’ve been dreaming about driving one ever since.

Series 1 shown as it's full kit, pre-assembly

Caterham racing series 2023

There is something wonderful about the Seven's continued existence.

A design introduced in 1957 has somehow survived into the modern era, passing from Lotus to Caterham while spawning an enormous family of replicas and derivatives along the way.

It has shared the road, more often, the circuit, with everything from Porsche 356s to modern McLarens, yet the basic recipe remains remarkably unchanged.

The Modern Experience

The modern Caterham may have considerably more sophisticated suspension, brakes, tyres and engines than its Lotus ancestor, but it has never lost sight of the original objective. Remove anything that doesn’t make the car faster, more engaging or more physically entertaining, and leave the driver with the consequences.

There is no great effort made to isolate you from the road. There is no mountain of sound deadening, no electrically adjustable everything, and certainly no two-ton luxury suite separating you from the tarmac. You sit in it. You see the wheels. You hear the engine. You feel what the chassis is doing. When it rains, you will get wet.

Yet this is precisely why the Seven has endured.

That last part is less of a feature..

Why It Still Matters So Much

Whether that makes it the better car is, naturally, entirely situational. If you’re chasing lap times, a modern supercar can produce figures the Seven could scarcely dream of. If you’re interested in comfort, refinement or arriving somewhere without looking as though you’ve just been involved in a minor aviation accident, there are also better options.

In an age where performance cars have become absurdly capable and occasionally diluted, the Seven remains stubbornly interested in the person behind the wheel. It doesn’t necessarily need more power to be entertaining. It doesn’t need another electronic system to make a corner faster. It simply needs a road, a driver and somewhere to point it.

But if the question is simply whether a purpose-built driver’s car can still take the cake, the Seven makes a convincing argument.

Sixty-nine years after its introduction, the Lotus Seven is still doing the same thing it was designed to do.

Allow drivers to enjoy pure, bare-bones motorsport.

And, all the while, annoy the tax man.