When It Transcends Mere Affection: A Love Letter to Lolita

Last month, I wrote about how, early this past summer, I installed a proper set of Spax height-and-firmness-adjustable lowering shocks in Lolita (my 1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special) but didn’t get around to actually driving the car until September, and how, once I did, I was over the moon at the step-change it made in my enjoyment of the car. This wasn’t a performance issue in the sense of better cornering—it was that the front shocks that were in it had failed in some way that wasn’t obvious by bouncing the car when parked, but had a CLUNK! WHACK! so severe that it felt like the car’s nose was about to break off on anything but glass-smooth pavement.

After the repair, this jarring behavior was suddenly just a bad dream. The combination of flawless fall New England weather and the Lotus’ suddenly smooth road manners made me want to jump in the car and drive it every single sunny foliage-flashing day. For me, it distilled the whole issue of why we love cars into a potent tincture. I’ve said most of what’s below before, but here it is from a more Lotus-specific perspective.

In my first book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, I talk about the subject of “imprinting”—how we develop attachments to certain cars and spend the rest of our lives following them around like goslings that have mistaken a glider for its mother. In my case, a college student who had a 1971 BMW 2002 lived with us for a summer and drove me around the back roads of Amherst, Massachusetts, forever impressing me with what the boxy little Teutonic sedan could do. This was ground zero for my owning 40 2002s over the decades. I will likely always own one. Or two. Or three.

But the other seminal automotive event I wrote about was how, when I was in the 8^th grade, I worked in a stereo store owned by a guy who was a serial user of sports cars. One day, he drove to work in a yellow Lotus Europa. Another guy who worked in the store (he seemed old, meaning he was probably like 40) and I stood there transfixed at this impossibly low, impossibly angular little thing.

After the owner was out of earshot, the other guy said something I’ve remembered for over 50 years: “A car like that, you can get sex out of.” As an adolescent, I thought that what he meant was, “It must be almost unfair how easy it is to attract women when you’re driving something like that.” Decades later, I realized that wasn’t what he was saying at all. He was talking about the sensation of owning and driving a cool car. In the chapter in Memoirs titled “So why do men love cars anyway?” I expand on this and talk in detail about how “middle-aged crazy” men often use cool cars as surrogate sexual objects and translate issues of intimacy and control onto them.

More recently, I wrote a piece called The Rules of Attraction in which I talk about the mechanisms by which we’re drawn to certain cars. The ones we keep for years tend to be cars where we love the look of the exterior, the interior is a view that pleases us when we open the door and is real estate in which we want to spend driving time, and the actual driving experience is one we find thrilling or at least satisfying. And if, in addition, we have some “imprinting” history with that model, the car is often a lifelong companion, as is the case with me and 2002s.

I’ll now add another vector for attraction: Cars we hold onto generally fit our self-image in some way. I absolutely love being “the 2002 guy,” or in a wider sense, “the vintage BMW guy.” And that touches areas other than exterior-interior-how’s-it-drive. It gets into how you use the car, what events you go to, who you interact with, and whether you feel that the community is “your people.” A big part of the pleasure I get out of vintage BMWs is that they do a lot of things well. They’re refined and so quintessential early 70s German, somewhat quiet, fairly comfortable, yet they’re a blast to drive and a joy to road-trip to vintage BMW events where there’s a gathering of like-minded vintage BMW owners. Who doesn’t enjoy hanging out with folks who like what you like? I recently gave a talk at the Larz Anderson Museum in Brookline, and during Q&A at the end, a woman said that she owned a ‘67 Mustang. She said it with such pride that I was certain she had a self image as a “Mustang girl.”

But the self-image thing is funny. I absolutely adore my 1973 BMW 3.0CSi. I’ve owned it for 38 years, far longer than any other car. It’s the only car I’ve ever paid to have an outer-body restoration done on. Fortunately, that was back in 1988 when it was affordable. I love the car and will keep it forever, but it’s now worth real money, and it’s so pretty and attracts so much attention that it clashes with my egalitarian Hack Mechanic yes-I-own-13-cars-but-no-I’m-not-a-collector self-image. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed. A few years ago at a BMW event I and the car attended, someone who had been reading me for decades saw the car gleaming in the sun and said “This is yours? Dude, I never expected your car to be so… nice.”

The antithesis of a vehicle reflecting my self-image was when I bought the 2008 Chevy Silverado 3500HD Duramax diesel dually with a utility body on the back from my former employer. It was an incredibly useful vehicle to have, but it just wasn’t me.

All that brings us back to Lolita. I’ve detailed how I bought it sight-unseen in Chicago in 2013, how it was very original but had a seized engine from sitting in a storage trailer for 35 years, how I spent six years rebuilding the engine due to cost-containment necessitated by job loss and career change, and how getting it running in 2019 was just the beginning of getting it well-sorted, as the car seemed to fight its own resurrection every step of the way.

But the truly remarkable thing is that I’d never driven a Europa when I bought Lolita. I had no way of knowing that this weird buzzy little thing would so completely grab my heart, or that driving at 42 mph in a 35-mph zone through twisty leafy bedroom communities west of Boston would be so much fun that I’d constantly feel like I should be arrested. The fact that the car is easy to stall and difficult to drive because it’s got a cable clutch and all the action is in the last inch and you can’t keep your foot on the clutch pedal for more than 15 seconds at a time because the floor is angled in such a way that you have to depress the clutch pedal at an angle with the ball of your foot which then slides off, doesn’t matter. Neither does the fact that the brake and gas pedals are so close together that you almost can’t drive it without taking your right shoe off. With fall turning on the colors, and with the bang in the nose gone, I just can’t stop driving it. Even after five years, it’s absolutely addictive. I just want to do it again. And again. And again. It’s like when you and your first serious girlfriend in college finished the round of antibiotics.

At the end of a 50-ish mile drive last weekend, Lolita and I stopped by a cars-and-wine-and-cheese event co-organized by the Arlington Classic Car Club and a local liquor store. While this is a group whose members gravitate toward French cars (and indeed, I now have serious lust for an Alpine A310), several of them had seen Lolita both on these pages as well as on social media and were thrilled to see it in the flesh and fiberglass, and asked if they could climb inside and see how close together the pedals really were. You don’t see Europas driven on the street much, and the fact that I use mine “like a real car” drew praise. One of the satisfying things about showing off the car is that, when folks actually see it, the whole “bread van/El Camino” thing vanishes, replaced with “that is so cool!” And it is.

My Hack Mechanic Tips for Sane Living include not craving things I can never have.  I know that I am never going to own a V-12 Italian exotic, and I’m fine with that. And while there’s no mistaking the Europa for one, it sort of serves that role for me, which I find highly resonant because that’s kind of what the car was supposed to be when it was new—the first British-produced mid-engined fiberglass-body-on-steel-backbone “for the masses” Grand Prix-style road car. When I’m driving the Lotus, I’m not thinking “Damn, I wish this was something ending in “’i’ and with eight more cylinders.” Instead, I’m fully present in the experience, and glad for the fact that it’s not everyone’s taste has kept it affordable.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a vintage BMW guy, road-tripping 2002s thousands of miles or jumping into my 3.0CSi to run to Trader Joe’s for cereal. But I REALLY love being the guy driving the heavily-patina’d monkey-poop-brown Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special on the low-speed winding roads between I-95 and I-495, and then beating it back home on Rt 2 or the Mass Pike. The Europa is half a step away from being a kit car. It’s certainly not refined like the vintage BMWs. It’s a little heroin-addicted waif that begs for attention and money. But it’s just so much fun that I constantly smile in disbelief that I get to have this experience whenever I want to. It may be too tiny and buzzy and uncomfortable and fragile to ever take on a real road trip, but it doesn’t matter. Our relationship is more like a series of 90-minute illicit hotel room trysts, and that’s more than fine. In fact, it’s exciting. I love this car in ways that just aren’t right.

And that, my friends, is why it is named Lolita.