[DML] Re: National Geographic April 1981

["Louie" <louie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I did some more digging around on this car when I got home last night. 
This was indeed the car that Lotus developed at their Hethel plant. It 
was essentially their hand fabricated first try at converting the 
DeLorean from the ERM concept car to a Lotus backbone frame, etc. 
Every picture you see of this car it has plexiglass solid windows, 
very primative fiberglass doors, the interior was basically a shell 
with a random seat thrown in, etc. There is a lot of talk in Stainless 
Steel Illusion about their trials and errors with most notably the 
rear suspension setup on this car, but wheel size is never mention. I 
think the picture Tiffany posted is somewhat misleading. I don't think 
the rear tires are actually 14 inches, it could be the slight angle 
the picture was taken. Every picture I found of this car in Stainless 
Steel Illusion and the DeLorean Gold Portfolio show that the rear rims 
are clearly larger than the front ones. 

But the interesting thing is this: all the pictures I saw showed the 
car with different FRONT wheels than this picture. They were totally 
unmatching. So it's possible Lotus was experimenting with larger FRONT 
wheel sizes. Or even more likely, they simply slapped them on the car 
for some reason or another that day (maybe a wheel got banged up at a 
track run one day or something, or maybe they wanted the wheels to 
semi-match for this photo shoot). I just wouldn't put too much stock 
at all into what you see on this car vs the production automobile. 
Keep in mind what George Crane said at DCS Pigeon Forge about the way 
the DeLorean was engineered and timeframes and such. Remember he said 
he had 45 minutes to design the pedal box, and had to design the total 
parcel shelf in 2 hours after realizing one day that nobody had? 
Everything was done so haphazard, with crazy time constraints, and no 
money.

I need to bring you all my goodies to Farrar's get together to show 
you (speaking of, when is Farrar's pow wow?). I think you'd be very 
interested by Stainless Steel Illusion and the Pennebaker & Hedgus 
Documentary that documents the development of the DeLorean from about 
1979 to mid 1981. The 'professional nature' of some of the board 
meetings captured is classic lol.

Louie Golden
Charlotte, NC

--- In dmcnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "content22207" <brobertson@...> wrote:
So the question, following your info is: Were 14 inch rear rims thrown 
on this mule merely as a convenience (so Lotus could at least drive 
the thing), or was Lotus seriously considering 14 inch rears as a 
design recommendation? Anybody know the rear rim size of Proto 1, or 
any of the "Doris" Pilot cars?

Bill Robertson



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