Am I right in thinking that the Lotus Elite of the 1950s-1960s was purely a glass fiber monocoque? How did Colin Chapman design it so it would have the required strength and rigidity? How many decades ahead of his time was he? Why are there no Elite-like Locosts?
Cheers
Karl

I'm 99% sure seperate chassis. take a look at Spyder cars web site. They do a rather nice line in changing Lotus chassis to modern Ford running gear. Went for a drive in their blue demo car and very tempted but at £12-15K a bit pricey.

Sorry Zetec. The original Elite was a fibreglass monocoque with bonded in sections front and rear to mount suspension. A chap I know has one and I've spent many a lengthy hour discussing the amazing nature of this car. Some of the lay up is about half and inch thick while in other places it is paper thin. Colin Chapman genius at it's best.

The body was built by Bristol Aircraft initially. It is their expertise that made the project viable. Later the body's were manufacture in house. Early Bristol bodies best supposedly.

Spyder sell elan replacement chassis', among other things.







Cheers

[Edited on 19/11/04 by SeaBass]

I think part of the reason this worked is cause Colin did a lot of boat design where fiber glass has been very popular for a long time.

Met a project manager a few year ago, he saw my backdrop (part completed chassis) and we got talking. He worked with Colin many years ago on the boat side. Said it was amazing to watch. Colin would come up with the ideas and another bloke would toil all day / night proving / disproving the maths. The next day colin would come up with the next set of solutions to the problems.

For other GRP monocoque cars take a look at the Quantum 2+2 and Coupe
http://www.quantumowners.com/cars/index.shtml
These similarily use some steel strengthening in vital areas.

James

As do the GTM cars, they seem to have a very well developed grp/kevlar chassis too.

Andy

Chapman didn't get involved in boats until much later, the Elite was a shot in the dark for him -- although he was a structural engineer with an almumunium company he knew very little about grp at the time. In fact a lot of the Elites structure was inspired by the Austin A 30 !!!!!!!.
The Elan was originally designed as a monocoque but it didn't work well as a soft top so one of the project engineers built a prototype with a backbone chassis to get some testing done -- the rest is history.

[Edited on 1/12/04 by britishtrident]

[Edited on 3/12/04 by britishtrident]