The Manningtree Revival: Lotus Carlton

Growing up, it’s natural to carry inflated beliefs of the power and performance of your Dads car. I remember, vividly, my Dad coaxing a tonne out of his ’81 Cortina, when I was six or seven years old. It was on a local private race track (Called the A12, it runs from Central London to the North Suffolk coast, making it one of the longest private racetracks in the world) and the car felt like it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. We were flashing past lorries and “lesser cars”, and the fact that the blue oval on my Dads steering wheel was the same as the one on all those big, rorty Mustangs I had read about, was a thought that I held close to my heart. My Dad had the fastest car in the world.

So, imagine if your Dad actually did have the fastest saloon car in the world. The kind of car where a mere hundred miles per hour could probably be reached on the starter motor alone.

The Vauxhall Carlton, the Britannic edition of the Opel Omega, was an all-round reasonable car. It could be bought from your local Vauxhall Dealer (there’s one in every town) in an endless variety of variations and permutations. If you were on a tight budget but simply had to have a big, there was the Carlton “L”. Most likely you would take your “L” with the 1.8 litre engine, which was “not muscular”.

If you had saved a bit harder, if your company car allowance was a bit more generous, or maybe you were trading across from a Jag or Rover, you might have tried a Carlton CD, or Corps Diplomat. This was the comfy version. It was lined with velvety velour, with ruching in evidence in certain places. There were many electrical toys to play with, and a host of desirable and prestigious exterior embellishments with which to impress the impressionable. A 2.0 engine with fuel injection, or a 2.6 litre straight six were common motivators.

The range was topped by two cars, which achieved different objectives. Firstly, the CDX which was almost embarrassingly plush by the standards of the more expensive German alternatives. Air conditioned and lined with walnut and leather, A Carlton CDX man could travel at 130mph+ thanks to three-litres of straight six. Alternatively, if one was of a sporting bent, There was a GSi 3000, and latterly a GSI 3000 24v. These, genuinely, were performance bargains. Perennial underdogs, they were often declared victorious in group tests of fast German sedans, besting the BMW 530i on many occasions. The 24v was, given time, good for around 150mph flat out.

All of which makes the Lotus Carlton seem rather silly and rather splendid. Lotus took the overachieving GSI3000, chopped it up and threw much of it away.  They tore the engine asunder before rebuilding it with new, strengthened, lightened and balanced components, enlarging it by 20%, and then adding two T25 Garrets for good measure. The bodywork was torn apart, the fenders modified for bigger wheels and brakes, especially at the rear end, and then a subtle but effective bodykit added. The garnish was an exceptionally high quality interior retrim and some discreet Lotus badges. The gearbox, incidentally, was a ZF Corvette item, with 6 speeds. I’ll bet every Corvette ‘box wishes it was in a Lotus Carlton..

The Lotus Carlton was explosively, violently quick. 60 came in 5.1, 100 in 11.5. A trip to my Dads secret, hidden race-track would yield a 177mph top end, Vauxhalls had no reason to employ Germanys favoured 155mph limiter. And all of this could be achieved with the rear bench full of baby-seats. Various road safety lobbies were aghast at this thought, they all assumed that people would buy these 377hp weapons, cram them full of children and drive around all day at a hundred over the limit. This car, in their view, was Satan on wheels. It was ironic, perhaps, that there were 666 Opel badged models built.

Of course, this didn’t happen, and eventually the killjoys went somewhere else to fulfil their moaning obligations. The Lotus did, though, encourage the horsepower wars to hot up, with BMW releasing their 400hp E39 M5 half a dozen years later.

It was quite reliable, too; the bonnet-up pose seen here is actually atypical and enables me to confirm that this car is the real deal. I would conservatively estimate that over 100% of surviving Vauxhall Carltons have been “converted” into Lotus replicas. Unfortunately, the creators of these tend to have skill levels ranging downwards from exceptional to elementary.  Some of them, with their feeble exhaust notes and feature-free interiors are utterly hilarious. From a distance I approached this car with some trepidation, expecting another shoddy, half-arsed imitation. It wasn’t long before I realised that it truly deserved its place at the show, with the appropriately named club, the Bahnstormers.

(All images copyright Hooniverse and Chris Haining)