Registry – Lotus 40/L/1

Chassis No.	Known Owners
40/L/1	1965 Team Lotus 1966 – Alan Eccles, UK – Car raced by both Alan Eccles and Gerry Ashmore. 1967 – Advertised for sale in AUTOSPORT, 10 Nov 67, as “ex Clark Riverside” for £1500.- equivalent to about £15,000 today. 1967 – Bob Waters, UK “early 1980s” – Roger Hurst, UK 07/1984 to 05/1997 – Peter Denty, UK 05/1997 to Present – Franz Stahlmann, DE

This Lotus 40 made its racing debut at the Austrian GP for Sports Cars on Aug. 22, 1965. With Team Lotus’ number two Mike Spence driving, he broke Dan Gurney’s F1 lap record by 2.1 secs in qualifying. Starting from the front of the pole, Mike held the lead for 13 laps over the bumpy track until he retired on the 13th lap from overheating problems.

The next outing was the following weekend on August Monday where Jim Clark took it out for the International Guards Trophy Race at Brands Hatch. Bad luck persisted, with Clark spinning twice in Heat One before stopping with a gear link failure. Heat Two was even worse, as the brakes gave out it put Clark against the bank at Clearways.

At the end of September before taking the car to Riverside, California, for the Los Angeles Times GP, Jack Sears was testing the car at Silverstone. The 40 let go, and Sears slid off the track into the left-side bank and rolled. Sears was severely injured, and the crash eventually led to him retiring from his racing career. (To read more about Jack’s comments on the accident, follow this link.)

The car was rebuilt, and shipped to the USA for the Riverside race. With Ritchie Ginther at the wheel, the car once again stopped short of the end of the race. Ginther retired with a broken gearbox. When asked what the difference was between the Lotus 30 and 40, Ginther answered that they took the Lotus 30, made ten more mistakes, and called it the Lotus 40. (For more on his comment.)

Following the Riverside race, both of Team Lotus 40 cars were put up for sale. Privateer Bob Waters bought the racecar from the works sale and used it for several years of club racing. He then used the engine, gearbox, exhaust and various other parts in his Concord 5000 car. According to Waters, the Concord was said to have even upstaged the 40!

According to Oldracingcars.com, the conversion was done by Chas Beattie. The spelling is also listed as “Conchord.”

Conchord (Bob Waters): Bob Waters decided to move into F5000 for 1969 with a new car build for him by Chas Beattie. Beattie had formerly run The Chequered Flag’s F3 team and built the Gemini/DAF F3 cars for 1967. He set up Chas Beattie Projects for 1969 and built Formula Fords under his own name, and the spaceframe F5000 chassis for Waters that was christened the Conchord. The car was built up using componentry from Waters’ old ex-Team Lotus, ex-Alan Eccles Lotus 40 sports car (chassis 40/L/1). According to Mike Kettlewell, it used “an ex-Jackie Oliver Mustang engine”; this would have been a 4.7-litre (289ci) Ford V8. The car was an unmitigated disaster and Waters withdrew after the Snetterton race in September. He was entered for a BOC Formula Libre Championship race at Snetterton again in April 1970 but is not mentioned in reports. The car was advertised from Kent in August 1970 but not seen again until it passed through Roger Hurst’s hands in the early 1980s. In 2003, Hurst mentioned that “the Conchord was built using the running gear from a Lotus 30″ and that “as far as I can remember it reverted to a Lotus 30”. At some point, the car was bought by Peter Denty, along with the Lotus 40 chassis and other bits. These were used to recreate the Lotus 40, so the Conchord effectively ceased to exist.

Source: OldRacingCars.com

In the early ’70s, the noted Lotus restoration expert Peter Denty was looking for a Hewland LG500 gearbox and tracked down the 40 in Maidstone. Denty eventually bought the car, minus the engine which had recently been sold for use in a road Capri. When he returned to his shop with the racecar, Denty says, “Everyone just fell about laughing. We dragged it home, pushed it to the back of the workshop, and forgot about it.”

Denty started on the car’s restoration in 1984. He reconstructed the chassis with thicker gauge steel and used nickel input to stop any splitting of the welds. Chapman’s Z-sectioned suspension was replaced by square tubing. Denty has become the world’s foremost authority on Lotus 30 and 40 restorations, as he not only restored this car, but his shop also restored several Lotus 30s while working on his 40. A Lotus 30 from Germany was used for body molds, and Denty was generously allowed by Peter Regna to study Regna’s pristine Lotus 40/L/2. As the engine was missing, and a 351 Cleveland engine was difficult to find, a Ford 302 was prepared by Mathwall Engineering to GT40 specifications.

Known Race Schedule

Race Date	Race	Finished	Driver
Aug. 22, 1965	Austrian GP, Zeltweg, Austria	Retired, 13th lap with overheating problems.	Mike Spence
Aug. 30, 1965	International Guards Trophy Race, Brands Hatch	Retired, spin in 5th place during the second heat.	Jim Clark
Oct. 31, 1965	LA Times GP, Riverside, CA	Retired, broken gearbox	Ritchie Ginther

Source:
“Forgotten Forty”, Mike Walsh, Classic and Sportscar, July 1992.

http://www.oldracingcars.com/f5000/lotus/ and http://www.oldracingcars.com/results/result.php?RaceID=E69E Retrieved 10 Oct 2017.

Last Updated on May 19, 2019 by Kirk Keyes