86 September 2019
arly in the 1960s, Ford’s marketing and
engineering approach was completely
transformed. Walter Hayes arrived as the
go-getting PR chief who not only secured a lot
of new money for sport and promotional
activity, but had the sometimes bizarre ideas of
how to combine the two.
First there was the launch of the Lotus
Cortina, the race programme which developed
around it, and then there was the opening of
the new Motorsport centre at Boreham. In the
meantime, the Cortina-based Corsair also
appeared, and Hayes sent Eric Jackson and Ken
Chambers on a round-the-world dash to gain
lots of publicity
Later, in August 1964, there was a more
serious attempt to prove that the Corsair could
be a rugged performance machine too. At
Boreham in Essex, Ford Motorsport was still in
its fi rst year of operation. It had already won the
Safari rally with a Cortina GT, but could make
no sense of the A-frame suspended Lotus
Cortina. Then, suddenly, for the Spa-Sofi a-
Liege of September 1964, where homologation
rules did not apply, they were inspired to build
two brand-new cars which we might call LotusE
Corsairs, which were effectively,
two-door Corsair GT cars, but
powered by rally-prepared Lotus
Cortina twin-cam engines.
It was an intriguing prospect, for
all the Cortina GT structural and
chassis changes were made to the
slightly longer-than-Cortina
platform (the Lotus Corsairs retained
leaf-spring rear suspension), allied to
a Lotus Cortina engine. In those
days, rally cars were still simple, all th
Lotus Cortina running gear — engin
gearbox and front suspension, that is
— slotted easily into place, so ‘new’
cars were created in less than a mont
Although this was certainly not
fag-packet engineering (technicians li
Bill Meade and Mick Jones were far t
skilled for that), it wasn’t a project w
took many months to develop, so the
neither time nor money to have lighta o
panels pressed. The project was a good idea
and the two cars were allocated to David
Seigle-Morris (ETW 542B) and Elsa Keinonen
(ETW 543B), but there was no happy ending.TWIN
PEAKED
e use o no as u osa ia er a s
Bosnia today).
Neither car survived, and little seems to have
been learned from the exercise. It was a ‘High
Hopes’ project.Did Ford ever build a Lotus twin cam-engi
Corsair? Well, yes, two actually...
David Seigle-Morris’ Corsair ended up on its
roof somewhere in former Yugoslavia!
Below: The Lotus Corsairs were simply
Corsair GT shells equipped with full Lotus
Cortina engines and running gear.MOTORSPORT
CLASSIC FORDS FLAT-OUT ON THE STAGE, STRIP AND TRACK