• Fitted with a Twin-Cam engine • An older rebuild by an aircraft engineer • Last used circa 2012 • Offered for restoration With the Elite, Colin Chapman demonstrated that his skills as a racing car designer and constructor could just as easily be applied to production road cars.

The Elite was, nevertheless, conceived with competition in mind (Chapman was set on class wins at Le Mans and the Monte Carlo Rally) and incorporated technology developed in Lotus's single seaters.

As innovative as Chapman's outright competition cars, the Elite featured a glassfibre monocoque body tub (the world's first), independent suspension all round and four-wheel disc brakes, the rears inboard.

Its engine was the four-cylinder Coventry-Climax FWE, a single-overhead-cam unit of 1,216cc producing 75bhp.

The work of Peter Kirwan-Taylor and aerodynamicist Frank Costin, the elegant body possessed an admirably low coefficient of drag (0.29) but made few concessions to comfort or noise suppression, not that...