John Simister: Perfection is a moving target in Lotus Elans

It's an original right-hand drive UK car which found itself exported, and now it has its original UK number again. It also has its original and perfect chassis and interior, rare in an Elan, but he's had the body repainted because perfect paint on an old glass-fibre car is as likely as finding a Rembrandt painted in acrylics. So the Lotus was pretty much perfect, and then it broke down out in the country because the ignition coil packed up. 

Thus was triggered a new wave of perfection-seeking. The coil needed to be changed, obviously. Then there was the clutch, which made a bit of a noise when the pedal was depressed and didn't always disengage cleanly. The engine bay's paintwork wasn't really perfect, actually, and the engine leaked a bit of oil. The starter sounded gruesome, too. So, my friend hoisted the engine out, the better to tackle all these imperfections.

New oil seals. A new starter ring gear (it was chewed up) and a new starter. A new clutch and corrosion cleaned off the splines on which the clutch plate sits. Rebuilt radiator. Restored carburettors (a pair of Weber 40 DCOEs), why not? Painstaking repainting of the engine bay. Lots of the other details you find if you go looking for them. And now it's all back together and it really is perfect, winning a Concours prize at the recent Brooklands Double Twelve.

I used to have a Pistachio Green Lotus Elan Coupé too, as I may have mentioned before. This perfected example has brought home to me as if didn't know already, how imperfect mine was. Even the colour was wrong because unlike the perfect Sprint which left Hethel in its near-fluorescent green, mine was originally a light, sludgy brown. My 1968 car had gained its Pistachio hue sometime in the 1980s, its finish described as 'rustic' by Lotus engineer Nick Adams when my Elan expired on the Lotus test track during a photoshoot and its bonnet blew away like a frisbee on the breeze.

The rusticity was noticed by Lotus's body shop technicians, too, who were smoothing out the chips the bonnet had gained on its landing and repainting the panel to a standard conspicuously better than the rest of the car, as they lacked the technology to make it look bad enough. Meanwhile, the Lotus special projects workshop was sorting out the gearbox, which had seized in gear causing the end of photo shoot play and the termination of my turbulent Elan love affair. 

Thing is, I had wanted an Elan for years. Since 1979, actually, when various friends started getting into sports cars. The lightness, the road-holding, the prettiness, the twin-cam engine and the thrill of the Lotus name were what made an Elan so covetable, but I couldn't afford one and bought an MGB instead. Then, in 2008, my chance came when I sold my Lancia Fulvia HF for a good price. I added just £5 and bought my S3 Coupé.

The S3 is the prettiest of all Elans, the Coupé especially so. It has the delicate and subtle wheel-arch shape of the early cars but the flatter, tauter waistline of the later ones. People seem to favour Sprints as the 'best' Elans, the cars that combine the squarer-arched S4 body with an engine fitted with bigger inlet valves and slightly racier camshafts, but there's a bit of an emperor's new outfit going on here. It's easy to uprate an engine to Sprint spec, and the rest of the car is practically the same as a non-Sprint. 

My Elan had Sprint inlet valves, bigger-than-Sprint exhaust valves, Cosworth L2 camshafts and went like the wind. On a good-tune day, it felt almost ballistic; it's the quickest car I've ever owned. But I never got its handling and ride to feel quite right, even though that is supposed to be such a central part of an Elan's appeal.

I tried. Oh, how I tried. Finding the right rear dampers was impossible; all those on offer were too stiff for the Elan's soft springs and bendy chassis. I went through various permutations, all to the backdrop of two cylinder-head rebuilds (a seized valve guide and resulting bent valve scuppering the first), a new petrol tank, reinstatement of the correct-ratio diff, a new steering rack and dozens, scores even, of minor jobs. Nor could I cure the wheel vibration, because Elan wheels are made of steel so thin that they bend and go out of true.

My Elan had a Spyder chassis, a tubular replacement for the folded-steel original but still to a backbone design. The original chassis is very flexible; even with the body mounted the ensemble is maybe a tenth of the torsional stiffness of a typical modern car's structure. The reason for the soft suspension is simply to stop the structure bending too much. The supple ride is just a welcome by-product.

But the Spyder is stiffer, and – as I discovered during our Hethel photoshoot with three other Elans in varying specs – it seemed to change the Elan's feel fundamentally, albeit not in a way that suited any of the dampers I tried. Maybe it was just my car, my particular chassis: I don't know. Crucially, nor did Nick Adams, dynamics expert and owner of one of the other Elans.

So, what with that and the final straw of the gearbox, I sold it. Mrs S always hated the Elan, the little plastic box with no side-impact protection whatsoever, and she was delighted. Now, if I need an Elan fix, there's a perfect one nearby. In Pistachio Green.