Exclusive circuit toy
Lotus is going to do something special. It has dusted off old designs and is going to build a race car that has never been produced before. As you probably expected, it won’t exactly be a bargain.
Lotus mainly achieved success in Formula 1 in the 1970s as a pioneer of aerodynamics in that sport, but founder Colin Chapman was also interested in the North American Can-Am championship. As a ‘trial’, a car was finally put on paper that should have appeared in the 1970 championship. It never got that far, but now this ‘Type 66’ sees the light of day.
Although the Lotus Type 66 is in appearance a car that seems to come straight from 1970, technically it is a different story. According to Lotus, the Type 66 is mainly a reflection of what is possible today. The beating heart, however, is a V8 with pushrods that, according to Lotus, could have come from that time in the base. Thanks to some more modern gadgets, the block is good for no less than 830 hp and up to 746 Nm of torque. That maximum torque is released at 7,400 rpm, so you can imagine that the Type 66 screams wonderfully with its striking ‘trumpets’ pointing into the air. Thanks to modern CFD technology, the downforce provided by the carriage has also become much greater than if the original design had been left untouched. Now more than 800 kg of downforce is generated at 240 km/h.
Lotus Type 66
According to Lotus, the classic design in combination with the modern improvements is good for performance that would not be out of place in the modern GT3 class. Those who want to try that out must be very rich and lucky: only ten copies of the Type 66 will be built, for at least €1.17 million each.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl