Background
The Lotus Cortina would have attained classic status on the basis of its name alone; the juxtaposition of Lotus developing a family car would have been irresistible if it had just been a straightforward marketing exercise - that the end product was an exquisitely engineered piece of competition machinery capable of giant-killing successes at the hands of folk like Jim Clark and John Whitmore assured it a place in the annals of automotive history.
Famously engineered by Colin Chapman himself, the Lotus Cortina ended up being even more successful than Ford could have hoped in its wildest dreams. The 1500cc Kent block, topped with a Lotus twin-cam head and mated to an Elan’s close-ratio gearbox, developed 105bhp enough to push the diminutive Cortina to a top speed of well over 100mph after passing 60mph in just under ten seconds. That might not sound like much now, but performance like that was almost unbelievable back in the early sixties.
The Lotus Cortina might have been based on the standard two-door car but enough changes were made to warrant them being batch-produced at Dagenham. Seam-welding and selective strengthening mean that the shell was significantly stronger than that of the normal production cars, and the edges of the wings were rolled to allow wider wheels and tyres to be fitted without fouling.
The suspension was also radically altered and uprated, bigger Girling brakes were fitted, and the spare wheel and battery were relocated to help rebalance the car’s weight distribution. While the changes did succeed in helping keep the whole thing under some semblance of control, the Cortina’s dramatic, three-wheel cornering style quickly became something of a hallmark.
All-in-all, 3,300 units were built, far in excess of the 1,000 needed to homologate it for Group 2 touring car racing – and Ford insisted on calling it the Cortina Lotus, an affectation the rest of the world ignored.
