We returned to Donnington for the second day of festivities. We had bought a ton of stuff of Saturday. Today was the day to go back for some of the items that were overpriced on day 1. Some things didn't budge. A NOS Elan steering wheel was still £300. But I did get my Cortina headlight trim ring for £20 instead of £30. Some things you didn't catch the first time around. Paul picked up another new tach for his Lotus 6. Speaking of Lotus 6, Paul and Rich spent several hours at the Lotus Historic register area shooting up 6 rolls of film on the two sixes on display. They also conversed at great length with Graham Capel, author of the Lotus 11 book. Graham was gathering information for his next book on sixes and he was quite impressed with the Yanks knowledge of such a rare auto. He took notes from Paul and Rich as to the location of some of the sixes in the states.
We headed back out to the parking lot to enjoy all the Loti out there. Even more than yesterday. I guess many Brits had to work on Saturday. Some rare Loti in the LOT (and they were Un Sold!). We photographed some of the nicer ones. There was an original Elan station wagon and an Esprit convertible! Lots and Lots of sevens, Elans, Europas, Elises and Esprits.
Mark had been doing lots of e-mail correspondence on the Internet with what we call the "Listers". There is a Lotus List that you sign up for and it is a mass e-mail bulk list. If you send in an e-mail to this web site, it turns around and sends it to a couple thousand Lotus nuts all over the world. So you may get 40-100 email messages a day on a ton of Lotus subjects. You can get a lot of hot conversations going on a number of Lotus related items. It's a lot of fun. So anyway, Mark had been begging for a ride in an Elise from a couple of Listers in England. They showed up on Sunday as we were strolling through the Lotus Lot. Two beautiful Mustard yellow Elises with dark green interiors and tops. Very nice. We took a couple of photos of Mark trying to maneuver in and out of the Elise. Anyone got a crane to help this man? But he did get his long awaited ride. One of the chaps took him out on some " B " roads up and down some hills and through the countryside at a very nice clip I'm told. He came back with a real silly grin on his face. Kinda like he just had sex in public without taking his pants off.
The van was full and our wallets were just about empty, so we headed off to the Donnington museum for what we thought would be only an hour. What a great place! This is a true race car museum. Row after row of vintage race cars. Lots of fairly new stuff as well. There was a whole row of Mclaren F1 cars with every model from the late seventies all the way though the early ninties. All with the same paint job. Williams F1 cars in abundance as well. Lots of old Lotus grand prix cars. There were Cosworth engines on engine stands all over the place. There was some real old stuff as well. Way before my time. Some huge big old engines. Great place.
We headed out and stopped at a gas Station for the first fill up for the Mercedes. 64.9p per liter. Ended up as £44.5 for a fillup. That's about $75 American! We grabbed some snacks for our road trip to the cheap motel we had booked for the night. Interesting flavors of snacks. Mark was adventurous and grabbed some "Roast Beef and Mustard" flavored crisps. (Potato chips are called crisps, French fries are called chips, how come the same language is so different?)
We made it to the motor lodge. Kinda like a Motel 6. Clean but plain. We found that on Sunday night in Newport Pagnell, all the pubs let the cook go home early, so we ended up eating at a trendy restaurant called The Hungry Horse. Like a TGI Fridays or Ruby Tuesdays back home. Only again, the food was nothing to write home about. But the beer was nice and it still wasn't warm.
