1973 GS Europa

Read the dates carefully. The Lotus beneath this bodywork is a 1973 Europa Special. The shape is not: it was drawn a year or two later, when the wedge had arrived and the Europa’s soft 1966 lines had begun to look their age.

Mike Rawlings, whose Lotus connections went back to the Hornsey days, took the idea to the stylist William Towns – the man behind the Aston Martin DBS and, shortly afterwards, the Lagonda. GS Cars of Bristol, then the only franchise in the country dealing exclusively in Lotus, supplied the donor car and carried out the conversion at its Warmley premises. Chapman saw the finished car and approved it to wear a Lotus badge.

He did rather more than that. As the 1975 Earls Court Motor Show approached, Chapman telephoned to ask whether the car could be finished in time to appear on the Daily Telegraph styling stand – the only Esprit he had was the prototype, and he wanted that on the Lotus stand. Midnight oil was burnt and the car reached Earls Court. This is that car: the first of the GS Europas and the only one built with a Cosworth BDA engine.

The commission. Rawlings had built a number of racing cars and fancied modernising a Europa at a point when the Esprit was still some way from production. Towns had worked with him before and agreed to draw it. GS Cars’ sales manager Alistair Fraser liked the proposal and found a suitable car; the work was done at GS’s Warmley works outside Bristol.

What GS actually changed. A new glassfibre outer skin over the standard structure. The original Europa glass and doors were kept beneath it, which held the cost down, and pop-up headlamps allowed the wing line to drop. The reworked rear quarters did something useful about the Europa’s notoriously poor over-the-shoulder vision – a practical gain, not merely a cosmetic one.

Earls Court, October 1975. Chapman’s call came late in the day. The Esprit was not yet in production and the single prototype was wanted on the Lotus stand, so the GS was finished in a rush and delivered to the Daily Telegraph styling display. Few rebodied cars have been asked for by name by the manufacturer whose badge they carry.

An honest assessment. Its owner is candid: the GS is heavier than a standard Europa by some margin, and whether it improves on Chapman’s original is open to argument. What is not in doubt is that it is very much of its moment. Since restoration the only significant trouble has been cooling, cured with an auxiliary computer-controlled water pump of the type used on BDA Escorts. His own summary: a Marmite car, you either love it or hate it. For the record, he likes Marmite.

A Southport thread. The car was restored by Richard Winter at Banks Europa – the workshop behind two other cars in this display, and the replacement chassis beneath a third.

Why it matters

Rebodied, reappraised and restored – a Europa that has been argued over for fifty years and is still here to be argued over.