Well, I can scarcely say Happy New Year given it’s now February, so let’s go with I hope 2023 is all you wish for instead.

And I for one have made several resolutions which, unusually, I intend to keep!

For one, I have committed to listening more to our membership’s needs, wants, and ideas. So please, do let us know if there is something we should be doing that we aren’t. Would you be interested in us reinstating the shed tours, for example? And if so, is a weekday evening too inconvenient, or still good? Or would you prefer a weekend? How can we make grass roots motorsport even better? Or anything else that tickles your fancy.

My other resolutions are mostly related to things I failed to achieve last year too (like rebuilding the Range Rovers), but there’s not enough room here for all that.

Speaking of weekends, as we were, the planning for our most excellent 50th anniversary celebration weekend in June is really getting going. We have over 1/3rd of the minimum places booked, which is exciting, but please don’t wait until the last minute to decide to come! You can book by clicking this link.

The theme of the event is Past, Present and Future to hopefully appeal to all eras of cars and owners, and align with the increasingly broad church at Hethel. If you have any photos of events, cars and the lovely people from, in particular, the period from 1998 to the present, we’d love to incorporate them into the collage of the history of the Club which we are developing for the event. So please drop Seth or one of us a line if you have anything you are willing to share.

Speaking of which, I am delighted to announce that our guest speaker for the event will be William Taylor, probably best known as the owner of Coterie Press, and the publisher of the famous Lotus Yellow Book. What you may not know is that he is now working for Classic Team Lotus and in close cahoots with Hethel, so we very much look forward to hearing first hand from him on the workings and goings on in the land of Lotus.

Slightly closer to home, we are hoping that the La Nina weather system, which was forecast to leave us this month, actually does! Because wet weather is definitely not the best for small convertible cars, and I for one did not sign up for this much rain when I moved here from Edinburgh.

With that in mind, the intention is to organise a few more day and weekend drives, so please, if you have an idea, and better yet are willing to organise one, we are happy to support it as the club, and therefore provide the benefits of being a Motorsport Australia-affiliated club. Just drop one of us a line and we’ll do what we can to help.

Of course, the motorsport calendar gets under way in April with Round 1 of the CSCA sprints, which we are hoping will be well attended by the Lotus crew. This year’s rounds are slightly curtailed by the absence of Wakefield Park from the calendar, and our round is now in August instead of March. We will need a significant number of marshals to make that work, so anyone willing to volunteer their time to come and flag, we and all those on the circuit will be eternally in your debt.

Next week on Wednesday, the Lotus Only Track Day at Bathurst will get underway, with the first of the Emiras that have now been delivered likely to be present. I am planning to get out there with an international visitor, Nigel Halliday, who is about as died-in-the-wool Lotus as they come, owning as he does the Lotus Mark 2 among others in his stable. He’s also president of the Historic Lotus Register and brings lots if news and intresting snippets from the UK. So if you have nothing in the calendar, come along for a drive in the countryside to Bathurst and catch up with a load of friends there!

And with that, I’d better get this to Tom. Take good care, keep safe, upright and mostly on the blackstuff.

Pip pip,
Ashton