Lot 218: 1956 Lotus XI 'The Yellow Peril' Ex-Graham Hill & Ian Walker

When Colin Chapman decided to put all Lotus' efforts into one race machine for the 1956 season, it marked the beginning of an epochal era in sports car racing. This car, of course, was the Lotus Eleven and it would reign supreme right up until 1959 and the appearance of its first real rival, the Lola Mark 1. Like the Mk XI it replaced, the Eleven - notably the first Lotus to have no 'Mark' prefix - employed a multi-tubular, but both stiffer and lighter, spaceframe chassis, while the beautiful Frank Costin-penned coachwork no longer featured prominent tail fins and overall was far more compact. Designed to compete at all levels of motor sport, three versions of the Eleven were available: Sports, with the 1,172cc side-valve Ford engine, a three speed gearbox, swing axle front suspension, live rear axle located by parallel trailing arms, rack and pinion steering and all round drum brakes; Club, which differed in using a Coventry-Climax, single overhead camshaft, 1,098cc FWA engine and four speed Austin A30 (later MGA) gearbox; and the Le Mans which boasted a de Dion rear axle with trailing arms, all round Girling disc brakes, mounted inboard at the rear, wrap-around driver's screen, passenger-side tonneau cover and headrest fairing, while power was provided by the FWA engine or the 1,460 FWB unit. Success on the track was immediate and the Eleven attracted many great drivers, including Chapman himself, Mike Hawthorn, Cliff Alison, Graham Hill, Archie Scott-Brown, Innes Ireland and Roy Salvadori, while late in 1956 Stirling Moss established three new International Speed Records with an Eleven. That year's Le Mans 24 Hours also saw an Eleven winning its class and finishing 7th overall; in 1957 another Eleven again won the class and finished 9th overall, whilst all four Elevens which had started had also finished. In the same race ten Ferraris started but only two finished, Maserati had only one finisher out of five, Porsche one out of six and Aston Martin one out of four. Not only was the Lotus quick and agile, it also lasted. The Eleven, too, was the car which established Lotus as the world's premier manufacturer of small capacity sports-racing cars. Assembled by none other than the legendary Graham Hill over April/May 1956 when he was working as a mechanic at Lotus Engineering in Hornsey, London, this famous Eleven Sports was originally campaigned in the 1,200cc class of the Autosport Production Sports Car Championship. Hill had raced for some years and shown his mettle behind the wheel but without the money to buy his own car he had taken the job at Lotus as a way of keeping close to the racing scene. The car was thus part-funded by Colin Chapman in return for its use as a works car - Hill would very successfully race other works Elevens right through 1956 - and the future World Champion gave his own Lotus its race debut at Oulton Park on June 9 the same year; he raced it at a further eight meetings that season and in nine races finished on the podium, four times in first place. It is very likely, incidentally, that the then relatively impoverished Hill drove the car, registered from new as XJH 902, to and from these race meetings. Subsequently the Lotus was displayed at the British Motor Show in October 1956 and was used as demonstrator at a Guild of Motoring Writers test day at Goodwood in November, after which road test reports appeared in Autosport on 23/1/56 and Motor Sport in February 1957. For the 1957 season chassis 208 was purchased from Hill by Ian Walker who fitted the engine with a Willment overhead inlet valve cylinder head conversion that boosted power output by some 20bhp. Walker raced the Eleven successfully at several meetings, results including victory at Mallory Park, Brands Hatch, plus 4th overall and first in class in the Snetterton 3 Hours, all of which helped him to win the Autosport Production Sports Car Championship and the Lotuseer Cup; he also entered the Lotus in sprint meetings, amongst which he took a class win at the Brighton Speed Trials. At the end of the end of the year the car was advertised for sale for £955 and sold to Don Le Clus who took it to Rhodesia and raced the Lotus for two years. He in turn sold the car to Bobby Duncan who changed the colour from yellow to British Racing Green before campaigning the Eleven for some four years. When Coventry-Climax-engined examples began to appear, however, chassis 208 was, inevitably, no longer competitive and the 100E engine replaced by a 1,340cc, 109E Ford Classic motor with twin Weber 40 DCOE carburettors; around this time the time colour was changed to a sky blue shade with the headlamp covers painted white. In 1966 the car, now with a blown engine, passed to David Pinder-Brown who already owned a Lotus Eleven Le Mans, chassis 286, the FWA engine of which was fitted to chassis 208. Subsequently, the car was sold to Ivan Glasby in 1970, before being acquired by Roy Kemp the following year who sold it in 1995 to Jannie van Aswagen, the latter managing to reunite the Eleven with its original 1,172cc side-valve engine, complete with the original overhead inlet valve cylinder head; the cylinder block, however, was cracked and this was replaced with another period casting. Van Aswagen entrusted organisation of the car's restoration to ex-Lotus and ex-Jim Clark mechanic Cedric Selzer, who also bought a fifty per cent share in the car, and chassis 208 was then shipped from South Africa (the primary reason being a lack of suitably skilled craftsman there capable of restoring the aluminium body) to Great Britain; this latter work was entrusted to Fred Fairman in Cornwall who was reportedly overwhelmed by the originality of the Williams & Prichard-produced panels, 75 per cent of which have been retained on the car. It was also prior to the restoration - carried out between 2002 and 2007 by well-known Lotus specialist Mike Brotherwood, with paintwork by Sovereign Coachworks carefully applied to give the illusion of age - that both Ian Walker and his mechanic from 1957 confirmed the car to be without doubt The Yellow Peril. Importantly, given that not one Lotus Eleven chassis was ever stamped with a chassis number, the car still bears its original chassis plate. Purchased by the vendor directly from Jannie van Aswagen and Cedric Selzer, this historic Lotus is now offered in excellent and freshly restored condition. An extremely well-documented sports-racing car with an impeccable pedigree, chassis 208 comes complete with a comprehensive history file, including testimonies as to its authenticity from former owners, related correspondence, the original engine block, the original non-salvageable body panels, a V5 registration document and a MoT test certificate valid for 12 months. This extremely important piece of motor racing history is eligible for numerous historic competition events in which it could be very competitive - a superbly presented and evocative Eleven which must surely be very high on the wanted list of any truly serious Lotus collector.