As a huge Lotus fan, when reader Chris C’s collection of cars crossed my desk, I knew I had to do a feature on his Elan. He also submitted his Europas, which you can find here in the BF Classifieds. If you don’t know about the Elan, it’s one of the most influential street cars ever built by Lotus, and for good reason. We will get into that in a moment, but if you’d like to contact Chris to make him an offer or to ask any questions, you can contact him via his Classified here. He’s asking $7,000 and the car is located in New Braunfels, Texas.

If you’ve never seen an Elan before, you might be thinking it looks familiar or you might even mistake it for a Mazda Miata. There’s a good reason for that, the people at Mazda were so impressed by the looks and experience of the Elan that the Miata is essentially their take on the design. Lotus only built around 10k Elans over its 9-year run. By contrast, Mazda built five times that many Miatas just in the first year of production! Of course, Lotus can’t take credit for Mazda’s success, but the Elan’s formula of lightweight, good looks and twin cam power definitely had a huge impact on it.

Let’s get into this specific car. It’s a big project and Chris makes it clear that it either needs a full restoration or is even just a parts car. These cars are quite rare these days, so I’m confident someone will want it. Hopefully, it’s to restore and not to part out, but it would be better to see it parted than left to decay. Admittedly, these cars can be a bit tricky to restore. The frames are extremely lightweight and prone to rusting out, but brand new replacements are available. The fiberglass bodies are known to be fragile as well, but at least fiberglass will never get rusty! This one’s frame doesn’t look too bad, but you will want to give it a full inspection. And the body has damage, but a new front clip and bonnet are included with it.

For a rare and obscure car, the parts supply is surprisingly good for these. That being said, some interior parts can be hard to find and engine parts can get pricy. It looks like most of the major interior components are present, but are in need of restoration. Unfortunately, the original engine has been replaced with a modern Ford 2.3-liter EcoBoost. From a performance and reliability standpoint, this engine is actually a big upgrade. There’s no word what car it is out of, but these engines are rated between 280 and 350 horsepower, which is a massive boost in power over the original Ford Twin Cam. It appears that transmission and rear-end are from the same vehicle, which likely means it’s from a Mustang.

If you are skilled at working with fiberglass, this might just be the project for you. With the EcoBoost engine running, the chassis reinforced and the body/paint work done, it would be one of the wildest Elans out there! What do you think? Would you take this project on? If so, would you put it back to original or get the EcoBoost going? Personally, I’d be very tempted to run the modern engine, especially if the transmission is a 6-speed!