{"id":460232,"date":"2004-07-01T15:00:33","date_gmt":"2004-07-01T22:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportscardigest.com\/\/?p=101037"},"modified":"2024-04-03T16:28:54","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T16:28:54","slug":"the-lotus-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/the-lotus-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lotus Years"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Back in the early 1950s I was racing my own Cooper 500 fairly successfully. I managed to beat the works team a couple of times, and I got noticed. Colin Chapman was looking for another driver. The people who did most of the sponsorship in those days, probably the only sponsorship then, were the fuel companies. I was already signed up with Esso and so was Colin. Colin made it known that he wanted another driver to Reg Tanner who was the Esso competitions manager. I was racing my own car at Snetterton and Colin asked if I wanted to drive a Lotus around. He said, \u201cHow do you like it?\u201d and I said it was very nice. He asked if I thought I could go a little quicker and I said I could go a lot quicker. He then said, \u201cBut don\u2019t bend it, it\u2019s the only one we\u2019ve got!\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cliff Allison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So, I went round quicker, and when I went home a few days later, there was a contract to drive for Lotus on my desk. In a nutshell, that\u2019s how it happened. It was as simple as that. Part of this contract was a retainer from Esso to drive for Lotus, and that was for \u00a32000. In today\u2019s terms, that doesn\u2019t seem like much but a friend of mine worked it out, and that would be about \u00a330,000 now. That was quite a lot of money, enough to keep my family without having to do any other extra work at all, and it left me free to do a bit more racing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n