At Peter Auto’s 2019 Spa Classic we caught up with one of the car’s three owners, Leon Douch, a self-confessed petrolhead who knows this Esprit’s story inside out. Leon co-purchased the car with long-time friend Ken Baird and driver and race team owner Greg Caton.
“Both Ken and I had Series I Lotus Esprits,” said Leon. “We’re both massive petrolheads and have known each other for years, and I’ve known Greg for years as well. We wanted something that we could race, basically, something a bit different.
“Snooping around I came across this, in period, and that it ran in the world endurance championship. So it was eligible for the Classic Endurance Racing series that Peter Auto runs, pre-1980 cars. So we thought why don’t we try to track it down. And it turned out that it was still with Richard Jenvey who was the original owner.”
Richard Jenvey was the founder of Jenvey Dynamics in 1987, a company that builds throttle bodies and other race parts.
“Basically, Richard Jenvey is a privateer, an engineer by background,” Leon explains. “He approached Colin Chapman to race this – there weren’t any others homologated, so he got this Esprit homologated. It was for the ’79 season but it was a Series I Esprit, so a 1976 car. And Chapman basically gave him a chassis and a body – I don’t know whether or not he gave engines or anything else like that, but he gave him what we later found out to be Esprit Chassis 02. It sort of when out the back of the factory at Lotus, so it was obviously a development car of some sort that was surplus to requirements. I think Jenvey kept the chassis, sold the body and built his body off of moulds. And it went to race at Zolder, Nürburgring, Silverstone, various others.”