Goodness me! We are into May and charging hard for, well, it’s supposed to be winter but frankly still feels rather summery. This has been great news as far as getting cars out goes.

We had the Elan out for its autumn shakedown last weekend. Said shaking unfortunately loosened the domed cover on the starter motor spindle and we left it on the road somewhere. Other than, that I can report she starts goes and stops beautifully still, and the sound of those Webbers breathing hard is intoxicating!

Early in April a great showing of Lotus owners (for which huge thanks to you all!) came to the HSRCA Autumn Festival to mark the 50th Anniversary of Jim Clarke’s untimely death at Hokkenheim. The weekend coincided exactly with the fateful date and the HSRCA ran a memorial race in tribute.

As mentioned we had a great showing of Lotus cars both on the track and in the paddock. One of our friends from Melbourne, Chris O’Connor, came up for the weekend and was reunited with his old Elan, now in the custody of Ed Holly. Smiles all round!

And I managed to find out the hard way that the Elite won’t take 185 profile tyres on the rear wheels without rubbing on the spring perches. That was an expensive mistake!

Otherwise April was a fairly quiet month, but now things start to heat up as we get into winter. Yours truly needs to extract a digit and get all the calendar events we discussed at the committee meeting into full swing.

So, I’ll try to do that between visits to Queensland where Gidget, our Austin Healey that is being prepped for Peking to Paris, has just finished being measured up for a full length bash plate. So I’m going up there next week to help Giles with some final fettling and hopefully a first run on the road. Very exciting!

Right, better get this to Tom so I don’t hold things up any further. I hope to see you out at Tyre Kick and Coffee on 20th or at the sprints the following weekend at Eastern Creek.

Meantime keep safe upright and on the black stuff.

Pip pip,
Ashton