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This Lotus Racer Found a New Buyer Fast—and Depreciated Even Faster
It ain’t easy—or cheap—to be a car guy. At bare minimum, you need a few grand in disposable income, a few square feet of accessible free space to park, a few tools, and a little mechanical know-how. This gets infinitely more complicated when you decide to go racing. Truck and trailer, more tools, more spares, more know-how, all the associated fees … it adds up. If it weren’t fun, though, nobody would do it. That’s why this Lotus 23 caught our eye online this week. Although there are certainly more affordable ways to go racing, $68,250 ($65K winning bid plus fees) for it seems like a hell of a bargain, all things considered. Especially since the exact same car sold for $94,500 less than three years ago.
When the 23 came out in 1962, Lotus boss Colin Chapman and his team were on a roll. The company was on an upward trajectory, both as a road car manufacturer (the Elan also debuted in ’62) and in motorsports (Lotus won its first F1 title in ’63 and the Indy 500 in ’65). One of a flurry of new racing models introduced in the early 1960s, the 23 was Lotus’ contender in the FIA’s Group 4 category for small-displacement sports cars. Cleverly, Lotus simply recycled a good idea by transforming the 22—which was the dominant car in Formula Junior racing at the time—into a two-seater by widening the chassis and fitting full-fendered fiberglass bodywork with a windscreen. In the spirit of the rules, Lotus gave the 23 the trappings of a road-going automobile, including horn, lights, spare tire, and a handbrake. It takes just one look at the thing, though, to know it’s a race car. A 23 is fewer than 30 inches tall.
Underneath that impossibly low fiberglass is a tubular space frame, with two of the longitudinal chassis members acting as water lines to link the mid-mounted engine with the front-mounted radiator, and two additional chassis members linking the engine to the external oil cooler. Depending on racing class, engines initially ranged from fewer than 800 cc to nearly 1500 cc. Most of them were Cosworth four-cylinders, though some private owners fitted larger engines later on. One 23, for example, raced in the U.S. to great success with 2.0-liter Porsche 904 power. The gearbox was typically a Hewland five-speed. The whole car weighed about 1000 pounds, which is roughly half as much as an also-tiny Lotus Elise.
Lotus debuted the 23 at the Nürburgring 1000Km race in 1962, armed with a 1.5-liter Cosworth engine against the latest and greatest from Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin, and Porsche (cars that are all, by the way, worth millions today). With Lotus’ ace driver Jim Clark at the wheel, the tiny 23 rocketed away from a rainy start and consistently put distance between itself and the rest of the field. Somewhere along the way, though, part of the exhaust broke and started filling the cockpit with fumes, causing a lightheaded Clark to crash out on lap 12.
Lotus also took the 23 to Le Mans in ’62, but a kerfuffle with the organizers kept the car from racing there and soured Colin Chapman’s taste for Le Mans for good. The French organizers took issue with the height of car’s windscreen, the capacity of its fuel tank, and its large turning circle. The team fixed almost all the issues quickly, but the real sticking point was disagreement over the spare tire. The 23 had four-stud front wheels and six-stud rears, meaning the single spare technically couldn’t work at all four corners. Lotus then modified the rear to accept the four-stud arrangement and even flew somebody out from the factory with special new wheels to bring them to the track, but the scrutineers wouldn’t budge and barred the 23 from racing. After the event, the organizers had a mea culpa and even offered to pay Lotus some money as compensation for the debacle. As detailed in Karl Ludvigsen’s book Colin Chapman: Inside the Innovator, Chapman then highballed them with a number deemed far too excessive by the French, so Chapman concluded the meeting with a simple “we shall never again race at Le Mans.” And he never did.
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Despite the Le Mans chapter, Lotus 23s went on to significant success in small-displacement sports car racing in both Europe and North America. Lotus built about 130 examples in total, including improved 23B and 23C versions, and they’ve been popular cars on the vintage racing scene for decades now.
The one sold this week has a bit of a murky history. It reportedly sold as a rolling chassis in the early 1980s and was basically an unfinished project until a restoration in the 2000s, which included a replacement body. Somewhere along the way, its chassis number was lost. Not the best provenance, then, but it is not at all uncommon for cars like this to have parts jumbled up, switched around, and lost over the years. The car was accepted to and raced at the Monterey Motorsports Reunion twice, and if it’s good enough for that event it should be good enough for any other vintage racing venue in America. It also has logbooks from the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association (SVRA) and Corinthian Vintage Auto Racing (CVAR).
Plus, it boasts paint from 2021, a set of Lotus’ hard-to-find magnesium “wobbly-web” wheels, and an engine rebuild from 2022. Dyno results show 202.4 hp at 8000 rpm and 143.1 lb-ft at 6500 rpm. Again, this is a 1000-pound car.
The person who sold the Lotus on Bring a Trailer this week is reportedly the same person who bought it on the same platform in 2022. Including fees, they paid $94,500 for it back then. They also didn’t race it during their ownership, but did say they started it every 30 days and drove it around briefly every 60. The reward for that due diligence in three years of ownership was a $30,000 haircut on the 23’s sale price.
When it comes to finding a rare, fast, and beautiful race car at a bargain price, the new owner here has already won. In the spirit of competition, though, let’s just hope this Lotus gets back to the race track as soon as possible.
I don’t care what you say, a thousand-pound car built 30-inches tall is gonna be fun to fling around a road course, autocross, or pretty much anything curvy. For that price, I agree – it was a steal.
Has to be an absolutely fast go kart. That power to weight ratio is fantastic.
I would find a way to put this on the road. I would want to drive this often in the summer time.
As for the price. Someone over paid at an auction and took a bath. That appears to be the norm anymore.
Stick to private sales and there is a lot less risk for the buyer and seller.
I have loved these cars. If Dan Gurney fit in one I can.
Was my goal as well 2 decades ago and got as close to that as one gets, road licensed with full race Hart, in Nanaimo B.C.
Don’t forget that many cars have come down in value from pandemic-fueled 2022. That’s beside the contracting market for 1960s sports racers.
Well much of the market went up during the pandemic due to the auctions. They were one of the few areas you could buy cars remotely.
Auctions help to get higher than reality prices at times but they hurt the hobby over all. Many have driven people from the market with artificial prices.
The 23 was not initially fitted with a Cosworth engine but a Lotus Twin Cam engine the same as fitted in the Lotus Elan.
I remember in the late 60s a guy named John Fuller, son of the Fuller Brush company founder, had one of these and I got a bit involved with his racing a Volvo P1800. I never did see him and his cousin, Len Greenhalgh, race the Lotus but at the time I thought it was a very strange looking car. I can’t recall what engine he had in it. This all happened in East Hartford, CT in around 1966 or 1967. Good times !
One of my friends autocrossed a 23 in the ’80s in CA. It was ‘slightly modified’ with a 3.5L aluminum Buick and a Porsche 5-speed transaxle. On a long, wide-open slalom event, it was clocked at 172 mph and the owner said, ‘NEVER again’! Wish I’d bought it when it went up for sale shortly afterward.
This is a great example of time march’s on. These were shinning stars in the vintage car racing seen thru the 80’s and 90’s. Those racers are aging out and the younger racers want something more relatable to them. You cant tune a Lotus 23 with a laptop. I’m 45 and this is one of my wish list cars, and I have watch them over the past 5 years reduce in price. They are also taking longer to sell.
Hopefully the lower price point will see more return to action on track!
These can be converted easily for road use