A man of many (Lotus) parts

Ed Reagan of Twin Lakes and his wife have been married a long time.  Not long ago, he knew he had to own up about something he’d done, but he hemmed and hawed about it for several days.

When he finally got up the courage to tell her, she interrupted him.  I know, she said. You’ve bought a Lotus on the Internet.

 She was right — even more so than she knew: He’d actually bought two of them, the second to serve as a parts car for the first.

Reagan already had a bright-red 1991 Lotus Elan, most recent of the four he’d owned before the latest additions. Why his devotion to Lotus, a maker of small, quirky, relatively obscure English sports cars?  

“I’d raced two models and seen what a little tiny car could do against the likes of Ferrari.  Pound for pound, it’s the most successful racing car ever.  Lotus has won five world championships.  They do everything really well, and they’re so much fun to drive.â€�

After driving an Austin-Healey 100-4 in college, he picked up a Triumph TR-3 and raced it in the 1960s before buying and racing his first Lotus — a Lotus Seven that he called “a very basic car.â€� (The same vehicle is manufactured to this day as the Caterham Seven, a frequent sight at the Lime Rock Park vintage sports car festival on Labor Day weekends.)  

By this time he was a senior market research analyst for Alberto Culver, the personal care products maker.  

“I watched everybody I knew in middle management leave,â€� he said.  

After a good friend was abruptly fired, he thought, “this is an insane business.â€�  In the western suburbs of Chicago he found a large garage for rent, looked at it, went home, spoke with his wife and signed a lease.

Over the next year and a half, he and two mechanic friends ran a repair shop that serviced “probably half of the Lotus cars in the Chicago area.â€�  Soon the area Lotus distributor asked him if he wanted to become a dealer, which he did in the late 1960s.  

He made frequent trips to England to buy cars and parts for Lotuses and Aston Martins, as well as accessories not available in the United States.  At one point, he said, Jaguar had no exhaust valves on hand in the States, so he bought 2,000 of them and did a brisk business around the country.

He met Peter Morgan, of the legendary hand-built sports cars family, at an auto show in London and signed on to sell those as well. The factory, which has a notoriously long waiting list, wasn’t forthcoming with product.  

“It was, ‘Oh, you want a car?’â€� he said.  In a year and a half, he never got one. A venture into selling Subarus was equally frustrating: “No one knew what it was.  You couldn’t give them away. I was about four years too early.â€�

After a spell dividing his time between running his own business in Chicago and working three days a week in charge of operations for the Lotus distributorship in Detroit, he wound up as a manager for Lotus East in Millerton, covering the Midwest and mid-South. He moved to this area in 1974 and has been here ever since.  He left Lotus in 1977, not long before the company decided to handle its U.S. business from the factory in England.

Reagan describes himself now as “semi-retired,� after stints — among other things — of managing an automotive warehouse in Hartford, running a parts and accessories store in Salisbury and “doing a little of everything� on the business side of The Lakeville Journal. He’s been active locally with CROP Walk and working on plans to replace the Salisbury-Sharon transfer station on Route 41.

He got back into sports cars with a Mazda Miata, which he says bears many similarities to the Lotus Elan of the 1960s.  Three years ago he acquired the 1991 Elan, an unusual front-wheel drive car with a fiberglass body that was sold in the United States only that year.  It weighs barely more than a ton. With a transverse-mounted turbocharged Isuzu engine and transaxle, it will do 146 mph.  

“I don’t drive it much,â€� he said.  “I want to keep the mileage down.â€� He was kind enough to put it through its paces for me on White Hollow Road, though nowhere near top speed. (Hot stuff!)

The two cars he recently acquired on eBay are both shark-nosed Lotus Elites, the only four-seater the company ever made. He found the first, a 1979 model, in southeastern Missouri. He had no intention of buying the car, which had attracted some 15 bids, but on a whim he topped the latest bid by $18. He went online next day, only to learn, “Congratulations, you have won. . . .â€�  The parts car, a 1976, turned up in New Jersey.  

“Between the two of them, I’m hoping to make a nice car,� he said.

A founding member of a Lotus club back in the 1970s, he got in touch last summer with several clubs and organized a corral of about 70 Lotuses at Lime Rock for Labor Day, complete with five parade laps for the assembled fleet. He expects to get as many as 100 cars for a repeat event this year.  

He’s not quite sure where he’ll store the two that will triple his Lotus holdings.  His wife, Ann, asked him:  “Why don’t you collect thimbles? Those we could hide in a closet.â€�

© 2008 by Keith R. Johnson. A retired senior editor of Fortune, Johnson lives in Sharon. Wheels appears monthly.