I have a confession. Much of my attention the past few months has been focused on the 1969 Lotus Elan +2 I bought last November. I haven’t written about it much in this space, but I absolutely adore this car. It’s a good deal more refined than my ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special. And although there’s no getting around the fact that, like the Europa, it’s a fiberglass-bodied car on a steel backbone and thus is never going to have the sense of solidity that a vintage BMW has, it’s far more of a real car than the Europa. Plus, it had a competent at-home restoration 13 years ago, it’s gorgeous, and like my red E9, it turns heads wherever I drive it.
As The Beatles sang, “And if you saw her, you’d love her too. And I love her.”
It had been largely sitting for a number of years when I bought it, but it didn’t need much. There was the clunking universal joint on one of the aftermarket half-axles that I had to press out and replace. There was the hot-running if the car wasn’t moving that was due to brand-X Chinese puller fans being installed as pushers on the front of the radiator and was solved by a proper set of Spal pusher fans. There were several ignition issues, one due to brand-new points whose point face rattled loose, the other due to the design where the tachometer uses current rather than voltage to extract engine speed and thus the ignition wire to the coil passes through the tach. In general, vintage BMWs revive just fine from slumber and act like a good dog who immediately wants you to take it hunting, whereas these old Brits act like an old man awoken too soon from a nap, but I finally got it to the point where I could hop in it and drive it with confidence.
So, of course, I began tearing it apart. Because it’s a more refined car than the Europa, and because it has terrible ventilation and is bloody hot inside in the summer, I decided to install air conditioning, something I’ve done multiple times in vintage BMWs. But unlike them, there’s no source to buy a crankshaft pulley with a groove for a compressor belt, or a bracket to bolt a compressor to the block, so I’ve gone off the deep end and am installing an electric compressor in the car, which requires a high-output alternator to supply the 50 to 80-ish amps the compressor needs. This clearly risks angering Lucas and his dark minions, but what’s life without risk, right?
Due to the hot summer and the ongoing a/c installation, the Elan +2 hasn’t seen much road time the past two months. There’s only room for three cars at a time in the garage, and for much of the summer, those were the red E9, the Elan, and the Bavaria, which as I wrote about, occupied weeks of my life prior to its sale to my friends Jim and Susan. When it was gone, it freed up a space in the garage, but with the Elan being partially apart, and with the spate of deferred maintenance work on the E39 daily driver (the front sway bar links, the front wheel bearing, and the power steering pump), having the room to spread tools and parts all over the floor was nice.
For most of the summer, the go-to vintage BMW was the FrankenThirty. Yes, I brought out the jewel-in-the-crown E9 for German Car Day at nearby Larz Anderson Auto Museum as well as for cars and coffees, but as far as grabbing a fun car to throw my guitar into to drive to a gig, it was all FrankenThirty. The car’s snappy handling and air conditioning made it a joy to jump into. And I never get tired of seeing those gold E30 ‘vert basketweaves against the car’s red paint, my “could this car possibly be any more 1980s” in-joke to myself.
It’s been a FrankenThirty summer.
My lovely 52,000-mile survivor 2002 “Hampton” had been sitting safely tucked away in my 98-year-old next-door neighbor’s garage since I bought the Elan last fall and overflowed my storage spaces. I was content to have it sit there, as, like the Elan, it isn’t air conditioned. But as August wound down and I could feel that fall crack in the air, it was time for Hampton to come out. This car has always been hard to start after it’s been stored; a battery jumper pack and multiple blasts of starting fluid were required. But once it was out of the garage, it seemed genuinely happy to be out and about.
Hampton sitting under wraps in my neighbor’s slightly-leaning WWII-era corrugated metal garage, just like mine before we replaced it.
I’ve long said that you can enjoy owning a cool car not just by road-tripping it thousands of miles to The Vintage, or showing it concours events if that’s your thing, or bringing it for a few hours to a cars and coffee, but just by running errands in it. It turns the mundane into an event. Once I had Hampton up and out and about, the car was an absolute joy for the twice-a-day runs to the hardware store or Autozone for assorted fasteners and electrical connectors for the Lotus’ air conditioning project.
How can you not love it?
We are all many things. Even within my car guy persona, I am many things. Right now, I’m really enjoying being a vintage Lotus guy. But at my core, I will always be not just a vintage BMW guy, but a round taillight 2002 guy. It’s good to be back driving one. Even if it was only a hundred feet away for the past eight months.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s latest book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books, including Just Needs a Recharge: The Hack Mechanic Guide to Vintage Air Conditioning. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
