To give context to this piece, I need to summarize events in the Lotus end of the world. The one-year anniversary of my buying the ’69 Elan +2 was on Halloween. Well, actually, that was the day I trailered it home. I drove up to southern NH in Hampton the ’73 2002 last year on October 29th to look at it, and negotiated with the estate sale broker the following day. He took the offer that I never expected to be accepted (it was low because the heater box was mouse-contaminated) to Linda, the widow of the deceased owner. When she heard my name, she remembered that her husband Henry and his best friend (the guy who’d restored the car) had come to the local Larz Anderson Auto Museum a few years ago and heard me give a talk about my Lotus Europa, and had chatted with me afterward and bought a book. Linda said that Henry would be thrilled if he knew that his Elan +2 was going to me, and accepted my offer. That’s how I wound up with the car.
But although I kept in touch with Linda and sent her links to articles about the car, I’d never met her. I resolved that, on or near the anniversary of the sale, I’d drive up there in the Elan +2 and close that circle.
A lot of time and energy went into preparing the car for the trip. The last thing I did with the car’s electric air conditioning before I put the project down for the season was to install a timing-belt-like toothed “Gilmer drive” pulley set to allow the crank pulley to drive the high-output alternator without a tourniquet-tight belt, as such a thing dramatically shortens the life of the bearing in the Elan’s fragile water pump.
The almost-functional toothed Gilmer drive pulley set.
It took me weeks of careful tweaking to get the pulleys aligned so they ran without shredding the belt and generated as little noise as possible. Big rainy weather was forecast to move in on all three anniversary dates, so I hastily arranged with Linda to come up on Tuesday October 28th. The trip was a success. I put 200 miles on the Elan +2—three times the distance I’d previously driven it. The weather was picture-perfect late fall; the colors may have been past peak, but the car’s eye-popping red paint (which is actually BMW-MINI Chili Red) against the background of russet late-autumn brown generated its own color show. I tell people that while I buy cars that are well-priced because they need work, really what resonates with me are cars whose life intersects with mine in such a way that I think I can help them be the best version of what they are. This Elan +2 is the best example of that, and it was great to take this road trip, meet Linda, and thank her (and the guy who restored it, and the estate sale broker who sold it to me) for enabling me to have this jewel that I never thought I’d owned.
But what this all meant was that the weekend following Halloween arrived without a lot of planning or attention on my part, and that weekend held another road trip.
My wife and I have dear friends who live in Manchester, VT. For years, we’ve gone up to see them either on Columbus Day Weekend or shortly after. In addition to hiking, grilling fish, playing guitars around a bonfire in their backyard, drinking scotch (well, that’s me and Jon; Maire Anne and Eileen stick with wine), it’s been an excuse for me to press one of the fun cars into service for the drive. I’ve written about taking Sharkie, giving Hampton the ’73 2002 its very first road trip, and driving the jewel in the crown, my ’73 E9 3.0CSi. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve taken the FrankenThirty, as it’s only had one road trip (to The Vintage this past year), but I drove it out to the Monson warehouse a few weeks ago in order to swap it for Sharkie, which I needed to bring home to sell. All three of the 2002s are also out in Monson (very rare; I almost always have one of them here at the house), as is the clown shoe.
My at-home options for “fun cars” were both Lotuses, the Z3, and the gorgeous red E9, of which only the E9 was a real possibility. I absolutely adore the car and love driving it, but E9s are notoriously rust-prone creatures, and I really try not to road-trip the car if I can’t see a clear rain-free forecast from departure through return. It looked like clear sailing on Saturday and Sunday, but rain was predicted for the return on Monday. Sigh, I thought; I guess it’ll be the E39. Or Maire Anne’s Honda Fit.
But on Saturday morning, when I re-checked the weather, I saw that the forecast had changed in my favor, with only light rain predicted for end of day on Monday. I’ve owned the E9 for 40 years, and generally consider it to be my best-sorted vintage car, needing only a cursory fluid and belt check and an airing-up of the tires. I joyfully went out to the garage and checked the oil and coolant levels. Unfortunately, when I peered through the translucent brake/clutch fluid reservoir, I saw that it was quite low. It wasn’t all the way down to the level where it feeds the clutch master cylinder (if it’s all the way down there, you know that the leak is in the clutch hydraulics). This meant that the leak could be in the brakes, not the clutch, which is certainly something you don’t want to be wrong about.
Bummer.
I had this happen last year to Louie the ’73 2002tii, and the problem turned out to be a leak from one of the braided cloth hoses going from the reservoir into the top of the brake master cylinder, and dripping from there down into the frame rail where it was difficult to detect. I looked down at these same hoses on the E9, and saw that they were not braided cloth but rubber, something I must’ve done decades ago. They weren’t obviously leaking, but I wasn’t about to embark on 350 miles of driving without knowing what the cause was and fixing it.
Sorry honey. As Bobby D. sang, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
The obvious move was to take my 2003 E39 530i. I’ve owned this car almost ten years now, which is like four lifetimes in daily driver years. It does anything and everything I ask of it. With its taut handling, just-right power, sport seats, and excellent sound system, it’s a great car for road trips, but I wind up using it very little for that, because, well, it is a 22-year-old 220,000-mile car. If I’m going somewhere with Maire Anne, and it’s not officially a vintage-car-driving exercise, we’ll usually err on the side of taking her 70,000-mile 2013 Honda Fit, as it’s almost guaranteed to get us somewhere and back with “no stories.” Plus, I remembered that, when I was replacing the power steering pump in the E39 a few months back, and had the serpentine belt slack so I could check the alternator and the idler pulley, I didn’t like the feel of the alternator. I made a mental note to find a decent used one, something that’s not Bosch rebuild crap, but forgot about it.
So, the Honda Fit it was.
I should point out that this isn’t really hardship. It’s a Fit Sport with a stick. The only things I can complain about are that the 117 hp from its 1.5-liter i-VTEC engine aren’t exactly tire-smoking, and how the bottom-of-the-Honda-product-line construction makes the car a bit noisy at highway speeds, but it’s a hoot to drive on tight curvy roads. And the drive up from suburban Boston to Manchester VT has its share of those. As it happened, there were more of those than normal this trip. Maire Anne wanted to stop at a quilt store in Londonderry VT on the drive up, and the route there kept us off the interstate for the entire drive. Plus, when we drove from Londonderry to Manchester, Waze sent us on the delightfully twisty Winhall Hollow Rd, and the tight nimble little Fit didn’t leave me wanting for something badged from Munich (or Hethel for that matter).
The 2013 Honda Fit Sport in the shadow of the Green Mountains and our friends’ house.
The only rain we saw the entire drive was less than a sneeze-worth on the windshield as we approached home on Monday afternoon. If it weren’t for the brake fluid mystery, I would’ve said “Should’ve taken the E9,” but no regrets.
Between now and my next piece, I hope to put the E9 up on the mid-rise lift, give its clutch and brake hydraulics a thorough going-over, and find out what’s causing the brake fluid loss. It’s doubtful the car will have any other road trip opportunities before spring, but I hate to leave mysteries like this unsolved.
—Rob Siegel
