Ok, here goes:
"Yeah, the Lotus? It's actually a Donnelly, built in Canada from
the original
plans.
Plans? Lotus didn't need no stinking plans to build Sevens. ;<)
>See, when Mr. Lotus
It's Mr. Chapman.
> died in 1963,
Chuckle. Rumors of his demise at that time were highly
exaggerated. It was 1983 when he finally moved to Brazil, errr,
umm, passed away.
>he had the Elan and Europa already
>on the drawing board,
In 1963 the Elan was in production, and the Europa hadn't yet
been conceived.
>and had these two builders, Caterham and
>Westfield both working for him.
Yuk, yuk. No such folks.
>Mr. Caterham and Mr. Westfield went to court in 1963 to see
which one would
>get the rights to all the tooling.
Uhh, no. Caterham (see Phil's response) bought the rights to the
design (such as it was) and the name. They took Westfield to
court in the 1980s over Westfield's use of the name "seven." And
won.
>There's about 50 different people
>building replicas all over the world.
Probably closer to 500. But the concept of "replica" has been
stretched a bit these days.
Jay
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