1978 Lotus Esprit Resto-mod!!! on 2040-cars

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Jay Leno goes old school with 1966 Lotus Elan 26R

On the latest episode of Jay Leno's Garage the guest's are both from inside the garage: the man they call Professor Jim Hall, Leno's master fabricator, and the 1966 Lotus 26R that he spent 18 months building. The Elan 26R was the racing version of the Elan that Lotus founder Colin Chapman began building after watching privateer teams prep their roadgoing Elans for competition duty all over Europe. Built by the factory from 1964-1966, drivers like Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart won silverware in the roadster called "the giant killer."
Hall, a veteran Lotus wrench, started with the 1966 Elan street car and turned it into a 26R that's arguably better than the factory original. Except for the engine block and head, original 26R body and Elan chassis, just about everything is custom built, highly modified or special order, from the fabricated oil pan, brake lines, safety wiring and oval exhaust tubing to the six-speed sequential transmission.
The episode is an unusually-long 21 minutes because, as an in-house build, Leno can go through the process of putting the whole roadster together. When he takes it for a drive and keeps going on about how it sings, you can hear it, too. It's worth the time to check out Mr. Hall's Opus in the video below.

Renault paid GBP1 to buy back its F1 team

Running a Formula One team is anything but cheap and straightforward, but it didn't cost Renault much to reacquire the Lotus team from Genii Capital. In fact, according to the latest reports, the French automaker paid just GBP1 – less than a buck fifty – for the privilege. Still, the process was deeply complicated. The reason Renault was able to get it so cheap is because the team was deeply in debt, part of which Renault will now assume. Less than a year ago, the team was said to be nearly $200 million in the red, and just a few months ago Renault came to its rescue to pay a $4 million tax bill to the British government. Under the terms of the new deal, Renault will assume the debt that the team's previous owners had accrued, but will be spared the nearly $150 million which its stakeholders loaned to the team. The history of the outfit based in Enstone dates back to 1981 when it was founded as Toleman Motorsport. French fashion giant Benetton bought the team in 1985, which in turn sold it to Renault in 2000. A decade later, after two world championship titles, Renault began stepping back its involvement in the team and gradually transferred ownership to investment firm Genii Capital, which has run it ever since under the Lotus name that it secured from the automaker under contract until 2017. Unable to fund a competitive team, Genii has now sold the team back to Renault, but the financial intricacies of the deal are far from straightforward. To start with, Genii and its subsidiary Gravity Motorsports (the team's parent company) didn't hold all the shares in the operation, so it bought back over 6 million shares from Whiterock Alliance to add to its own 60 million shares. The vast majority of those shares were then transferred (for that princely sum of GBP1) to Gringy (UK) Ltd, the shell company that technically owned the team in its Benetton days. Gringy (a wholly owned subsidiary of Renault) will hold a 90-percent stake in the team, with the last 10 percent remaining in Genii's hands and those of its investors. In the process, the outfit will now rejoin the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes among the F1 teams developing their own powertrains. Related Video: News Source: Motorsport.comImage Credit: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Earnings/Financials Motorsports Lotus Renault F1 genii capital

Race Recap: For the 2013 Monaco Grand Prix, NASCAR comes to the principality

Lots of contact, debris cautions, trips into the wall, full-course yellows and a red flag - these are the kinds of racing terms you unbox when you want to have a conversation about NASCAR... or the Formula One grand prix of Monaco. In this case we're not talking about the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, we're talking about 78 laps in the South of France that even featured a fallen camera cable just like that stock-car race.
This year, Mercedes-AMG Petronas drivers treated their chassis' like busses instead of F1 cars, Romain Grosjean treated his Lotus like a battering ram, Sergio Perez kept sticking his McLaren's nose in places and eventually got it smacked, and maybe the size of the drivers' mirrors should be changed instead of the tires as there were almost as many firsts as there were crashes. Plenty of F1 fans wish Monaco were removed from the calendar, yet even though it doesn't specialize in traditional thrills, that doesn't mean nothing happens during the parade through - and into - the barriers.