“Plus 2” for a Second Lotus, and More Mice

You already know from the title and the cover photo what happened. But you’re here for the story. This is a good one.

If you read me, you know that I own a ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special that I adore. You also know that I’ve expressed interest several times in buying a Lotus Elan +2 (also written as “Plus 2”), which is a contemporary of the mid-engine Europa and the front-engine Elan two-seater roadster. The Elan +2 has the same Lotus-Ford Twin-Cam engine as the other two cars, and shares their basic architecture of a fiberglass body on a steel backbone, but it’s a completely different car than the Elan—it’s two feet longer, about eight inches wider, and as the +2 designation implies, has a small back seat. Unlike my Europa, the Elan +2’s looks aren’t challenging or divisive; it looks great from any angle. I saw one for the first time five years ago when I drove my just-resurrected Europa to the Lotus Owner’s Gathering in nearby Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and was instantly smitten.

Although I have this whack-job image of making questionable purchases that serve no rational goal other than generating content (*cough Armada FrankenThirty cough*), I’m actually very deliberative about these things, which is why my wife stays married to me. After I got my Europa running in 2019, I added up the costs, and found that I had twenty grand in the car (more like $22k now). While many folks say “NEVER add it up,” looking the $20k number in the face was important because what it meant with respect to buying another vintage lotus like an Elan +2 was that there was no pretending that the cost of resurrecting a dead one wouldn’t be similar. So when, about three years ago, I looked at a basket-case Elan +2 (see here and here), I knew that I’d have to get the car for next to nothing to make the numbers work. I didn’t, and that was fine.

Then, early this summer, I actually found one for next to nothing—there was a thousand-dollar backyard Elan +2 listed on Facebook Marketplace. I appeared to be the first responder, but a flipper snagged it out from under me and, a day later, listed it for eight grand. As I wrote about here, my annoyance was less that I realistically wanted the car and more that a) I wanted to see it and make that judgment for myself, and b) I had trouble viewing the flipper’s actions as anything but parasitic. But whatever. (And, if you’re curious, that article has more in it about the different versions of the +2.)

Taking a step back, we love what we love. No one is ever going to convince me to buy a Subaru WRX or a Nissan Skyline or an American muscle car. My itch is mainly scratched by late-60s and early ’70s European cars. My focus for 45 years has been on vintage BMWs, but the pull of British cars is strong. I had a 1970 Triumph GT6 back in college, and I still keep my eyes open for another. There is a lot of panache, verve, and snap to Brit bits from this era. When I see them at cars and coffees, the size, the lines, the interior, the wood dashboards remind me of why they were so popular back in the day, and why, after 50-60 years, there’s still a lot to love.

I mention this because the Don Quixote-like unreachable star for me is an E-Type Jaguar. In my incessant pounding on Facebook Marketplace, I couldn’t help but notice a lovely-looking’71 Series II whose price kept dropping. It went from $55k to $45k, and when it reached $37.5k, I began thinking things that weren’t right. However, the facts that the seller had red flags on Yelp for misrepresenting cars, and that the car had sold on eBay and then was relisted, warned me off looking at it.

But during the obligatory “I wonder what other E-Types are out there” exercise, I happened into the Craigslist ad for the ’69 Elan +2. The ad included photos of a body-off restoration, and receipts for an engine rebuild that included Sprint-specification camshafts (the cams that are in the later Elan +2S/130). And, like the E-Type, its price also dropped—it began at $20k, then was lowered to $17k.  Although the car was solid red, and in my fantasies I wanted a blue one with a contrasting roof (the two-tone factory paint jobs accentuate the beautiful upper line of the body of the car), when the asking price reached $15k, I contacted the seller.

The story was that the +2 was a consigned estate sale for the widow of the owner. The fellow handling the sale was wonderful. When I asked the standard “Tell me about the car” question, he recited history that went back four owners. When he was done, I literally said “That was the most thorough professional recitation of provenance I’ve ever heard on the other end of a phone.”

The seller said that the car had been off the road for about four years and had a quick recommissioning by the two-owners-ago fellow who’d restored the car and was a friend of the deceased owner. The recommissioning reportedly did not include a back-to-front fuel system cleanout. Rather, the gas didn’t smell like shellac, so fresh gas was simply added. The battery was replaced, a balky electronic ignition system was swapped for the original points-and-condenser distributor, and a deteriorated carb-to-intake-manifold o-ring seal was replaced.

As far as the body, the seller diplomatically advised that the car’s weak point was its paint, as it wasn’t quite up to the level of the mechanical restoration. He said that he told callers that this wasn’t a concours-quality $40,000 car being offered at $15k. Even that caveat notwithstanding, while the solid-red paint job looked decent enough in the photos, it didn’t light my fire the way that two-tone cars did. Plus, with my 38-year-owned red BMW 3.0CSi and my recently-purchased red BMW E30 325is, there was more than enough red in my driveway. The seller offered that the car’s imperfect paint might give me an opening to repaint it the color I want. I don’t recall if I said “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” or just thought it

While I told the seller that I really try not to waste anyone’s time including my own, arranging to see the car felt like it was right on that line. I was curious enough to take the one-hour drive to southern New Hampshire if he would have me, but my left brain said that the trip was probably just fodder for yet a third Hagerty piece about an Elan +2 that I didn’t buy. However, subconsciously, I think that my right brain was more open to possibilities. Elan +2s aren’t rare, but intact ones at a good price point an hour’s drive away are.

It all changed in a heartbeat when I saw the car. My jaw dropped. It was absolutely gorgeous. The seller methodically pointed out stress cracks in the paint on the fiberglass trunk lid, a few imperfections on the roof, and two under-dings on the hood from where it was hitting an aftermarket aluminum radiator, but none of these remotely detracted from the car’s breathtaking presence. I said that he must be like me, where my wife tells me I actively scare off buyers by being too truthful. He explained that he looks at things with a restorer’s eye, both because he used to have a business restoring British cars and because one of the hats he wears is buying and selling high-end cars where all flaws must be disclosed. We talked about how, as a seller, under-promising and over-delivering makes for happy customers.

I gave the car a once-over, then we drove it. The only thing I sensed that could be a result of the rapid recommissioning was some low-rpm stumbling, though when I goosed it and it came on the Sprint-spec cams, it had substantially more giddyup than my federal-spec Europa. Other than an annoying scrape from lack of clearance between the steering wheel’s hub and the trim behind it, the car was delightful to drive.

However, as we gathered speed on the narrow winding NH road, I smelled the unmistakable acrid stink of mouse urine wafting out the dashboard vents. Just as I was about to mention it, the seller said “Wow, I didn’t realize the mouse smell was anywhere near this strong.” We rotated the vents closed, but the bloom was already off the rose and in my nose.

Mice. Why is it always @#$*&ing mice?

When we returned to the garage, I put the car up on the plastic ramps I’d brought and checked the undercarriage. There was the obligatory small British oil leak, but I didn’t see any coolant. This was of crucial importance because the Lotus-Ford Twin-Cam engine’s water pump is integral with the front timing chest, and correcting leakage requires pulling the head and the oil pan to remove the chest.

The seller and I then spoke at length on a variety of subjects (he’d owned several BMW 2002s back in the day), swinging off on tangents, then vectoring back to the Lotus. He said that the owner’s wife wanted the car sold before winter, and that other people had seen and driven it but didn’t really appreciate that a 55-year-old Lotus isn’t going to drive like a 10-year-old Porsche. He encouraged me to make a reasonable offer. I said that I needed to think about the rodent situation carefully. He nodded and said that he strongly prefers to deal with one potential buyer at a time, so he requested that I make an offer or decline to do so within 24 hours. I agreed.

Before I left, I did one more thing—I took my flashlight and shined it into the driver’s side vent to check if I could see a mouse nest. Instead, I saw a whole mouse body. It almost certainly didn’t change the fact that the heater box needed to come out to be cleaned, but perhaps removing the low-hanging dead fruit would take the edge off the smell. I waved the seller over, handed him the flashlight, and asked “Do you see the dead mouse?”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“I see the live mouse.”

Oh dear. Not just nesting, but active nesting.

With the seller’s permission, I pulled the hose off the back of the vent, thinking that I could lower it and just gravity-slide the mouse into a jar. The mouse, of course, retreated into the heater box.

In total, I was there for 2 ½ hours. I thanked the seller profusely for spending so much time with me and letting things unfold at their own pace.

When I got home, I did some sleuthing. I found a thread on the Lotus Elan forum where the two-owners-ago restorer bought the car from the three-owners-ago guy who’d bought it as a parts car but realized it was far too nice to part out. I also found a photo of the restorer with a gentleman who I referred to in my book The Lotus Chronicles as “The Lotus Engine God” and who was absolutely instrumental in helping me rebuild the engine in the Europa (he has since passed away). But most powerfully, I found the owner’s obituary. His wife wrote about how much he loved the car, how he’d bought it from his best friend in 2013, how they worked on it together, drove it regularly to British Car Day at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in nearby Brookline, and attended the Labor Day Lime Rock Historic Festival together for ten years. I began to feel that the car had been in my orbit all this time with one degree of separation.

In the morning, I collected my thoughts. I was deeply attracted to the car, but it all came down to the mouse contamination. Having recently dealt with the mouse-infested truck, the mouse-infested Armada, the mouse-infested ratty (heh) BMW E30, and ongoing rodent contamination issues with my own Lotus that will never be completely solved until I pull the body off the frame because the nests are between the two, on the one hand, I could deal with it in the +2, but on the other hand, I really didn’t want to. It’s a lot of work and has substantial risk. Of the four mouse-decon projects listed above, it was only in the Armada that I solved it completely because the contamination was stopped by the cabin filter. The E30 still smells (though not nearly as bad) because I didn’t want to go to the level of effort to pull the heater box; I cleaned it in situ instead.

In contrast, the +2 is a beautiful and valuable car where you’d want to get it right. If the +2’s contamination is confined to the heater box, the recipe of pulling the box, disassembling it, removing the bulk contamination, scrubbing the surfaces with enzyme-based cleaner, spraying the cleaner on nearby surfaces and wiping them down, then letting an ozone generator sit in the car overnight to knock out the residual smell that permeates into porous surfaces should be effective. However, if rodent waste also permeates soft surfaces such as the soundproofing or the carpet, or if they’d chewed wiring or other product, the damage could be much more severe.

However, I was keenly aware that other potential buyers who drove the car would experience the full force of the contamination like I did, and it would likely repel those who were looking for a turnkey car.

I thought about it carefully, and realized that all the mouse-contaminated cars I’d purchased or passed on were mousy as part of an overall level of neglect, usually accompanied by sitting outside. This was the first and only one where the car had had a restoration followed by loving care and indoor storage. I write about how every value-conscious DIY car person wants to find a pretty, shiny rust-free car with a great interior being sold for a good price because there’s one big expensive thing wrong (like a blown head gasket) that makes the seller want to shut off the spending tap and bail out of the car. I realized that this was that, but with mice.

Taking that and the fact that the seller said the owner wanted it sold by winter into consideration, I calibrated a credible offer that had the risk baked into it. If it was accepted, great, and if not, I got out of having to deal with the fourth rodent-contaminated vehicle in the last two years. I said that while there was no expiration date on my offer, I could make it happen this week if the owner wanted the car gone, but if she wanted to wait and see if a better offer was out there, that was fine too.

I ran the situation past my saint-like wife. She was initially skeptical (“Why on Earth do you want another mouse-infested car?”), but when I showed her the pics and explained the logic, she commended me on my approach (although, with her exquisitely sensitive sense of smell, she wouldn’t commit to riding in it, even after it was supposedly de-moused).

I hit send on the email. I didn’t expect the offer to be accepted. It was more that I would’ve regretted not having given it the shot.

The next day, the seller called me. What he told me almost knocked me off my chair.

He said he spoke with the owner and told her that I was the right person to buy the car. When he told her my name, she said that her husband and his best friend (the guy who restored it) came to hear a talk I gave about the resurrection of my Europa two years ago at Larz Anderson and that I chatted with them afterwards. She said that her husband would be thrilled if he knew that I was the buyer. Offer accepted. Money wired.

Holy crap, right?

I pick up the car tomorrow, at which point The Great Hack Mechanic Two-Lotus Era begins. I get to find out:

• If Lotus stands for “Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious,” with two, how much trouble am I really in?
• If British cars mark their territory, will I ever see my garage floor again?
• Was Lotus founder Colin Chapman misquoted when he reportedly said, “Simplify, then add lightness? Did he actually say “Simplify, then add miceness?” (okay, kudos to my friend Eric King for that one)

And my first +2-related purchase: