Chris MacAllister insists that he had no idea that his car might win an award at the 30th Amelia Concours d’Elegance, much less the coveted Concours de Sport Best in Show on Saturday afternoon at the oceanfront Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida, just north of Jacksonville.
“Blow me down!” MacAllister said. “I just came here to have fun.”
MacAllister might be surprised, but arguably few showgoers who took a hard look at his immaculate 1967 Lotus 49 Formula 1 car would have bet against his British Racing Green number 5.
Especially considering the car’s provenance: The legendary Jim Clark drove it from the eighth starting spot to victory in the Dutch Grand Prix F1 race in 1967, followed by wins in the British Grand Prix and the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, and he was leading the Italian Grand Prix in this car when he ran out of fuel on the last lap.
In 1968, the car was driven by Jo Siffert, and then Jackie Oliver, but with no wins and only one podium. It would seem this Lotus 49, chassis number R2, was truly Jimmy Clark’s car.
Less than a year later, Clark was killed racing in a minor Formula 2 event in Hockenheim, Germany, when his Lotus 48 crashed into the trees that lined the track. He was 32.
That this Lotus is now Chris MacAllister’s car had its unlikely origins decades ago, and he owes it to the public school system. “My fourth-grade elementary school class took a field trip to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway one day in May for practice, and for me, that lit the fuse,” the self-described Indianapolis heavy equipment dealer told Hagerty. “I went to the race that year, in 1965, and Jimmy Clark won. So he became my hero. And he’s still my hero.”
Chassis number R2 was restored in 2010 by Classic Team Lotus, which is run by Clive Chapman, son of Colin Chapman, who founded Lotus in 1952. As a race car designer,the elder Chapman pioneered a massive number of innovations, from aerodynamics to monocoque chassis construction, and the Lotus 49 was well ahead of the competition.
“It has always been a complete, running car,” MacAllister said. “Over the years it evolved from 49A, to B, to C configurations, so we took it back to how it was in 1967.” The car’s a runner, “and we’ll have it running at Laguna Seca in August.” That will be for the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, which will be celebrating the 75th anniversary of Formula 1. More than two dozen vintage F1 cars are expected to line up for the race.
The slight, unassuming president of MacAllister Machinery—there’s something about him that “screams algebra teacher,” said a 2014 profile in the Washington Times—is well known and respected in the car collecting world, especially on the motorsports side.
This Lotus 49 is, MacAllister said, “my favorite race car of all time,” and he owns a lot of race cars. It’s also the only Lotus in his garage, which contains a variety of cars, beginning with a 1907 Locomobile, up through “modern vehicles—Jeeps and trucks and motorcycles—I like all sorts of stuff.”
After this particular car was retired from Lotus F1 competition, it was sold to a privateer, who sold it to a friend of MacAllister, who then sold it to him. MacAllister has raced his cars successfully in vintage competition at places like Daytona, Le Mans, and Monaco, where, unfortunately, he bent up the nose of his beloved Lotus 11 years ago due to an issue with the right front wheel.
The Lotus 49 was designed for the 1967 Formula 1 season, and Clark’s win at the Dutch Grand Prix was also the 49’s debut race. It was a groundbreaking car for multiple reasons, the central one being that it used the rear-mounted engine as a stressed member of the chassis.
The 49 was also the first F1 car to be powered by the Ford Cosworth DFV engine, which stood for Double Four Valve. That 3.0-liter V-8 had an incredibly long lifespan, powering F1 cars through 1985, 18 years after it was introduced in the Lotus, and it was also used in many different types of racing, including IndyCar and sports cars, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1975 with Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell driving.
And speaking of Derek Bell, the 83-year-old, who raced in Formula 1 for Ferrari and has five overall wins at Le Mans, was on hand at Amelia and present at the victory celebration for the Lotus’ win. “I can’t believe the car that won the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix is sitting here,” he said, standing next to MacAllister’s Lotus. “Quite amazing.”
The Amelia Concours announcer, Justin Bell—Derek’s son, and the 1998 GT2 class winner of Le Mans, driving a Dodge Viper GTS-R—was similarly impressed by MacAllister’s intricate, frail-looking little Lotus, from an era when F1 cars provided such minimal protection for the driver. It stands in contrast to last year’s Concours de Sport winner, a stout-looking 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO.
“The concours judges have a really tough job to do,” he said. “The competition, especially in this class, was unparalleled here,” with race cars on display dating back 117 years. “I think it’s spectacular—this is, after all, known as the motorsport concours—and it’s what the start of motor racing is all about: Very brave men, in cars that pushed the limits of technology, and you could die doing it. And they did. The fact that we have a car like this here and it wins, all these years later, is very fitting.”
Report by Steven Cole Smith for hagerty.com
