I needed a place to document the restoration of this Lotus Esprit. It's going up for sale, so why not a product page?

This is a 1977 Lotus Esprit S1 chassis number 351H. 

I'll start with the bad news first. It has a rebuilt Texas title with "loss unknown" on it. I bought the car from a widow. It was her husband's car. He bought it in the early/mid 1980's and tagged it around 1986. He passed away from cancer in 1993. His widow moved a couple times and eventually decided it was time to sell the car.  I'll list the before photos and a copy of the original add here. They originally listed it as a 1979 Lotus, but when I saw the photos the first thing I noticed was the World Champions badge on the back stoped at 1973. Lotus won in 1978, so I knew the car was not a 1979. It turned out to be one of the last 1977 cars sold in the US.  So anyway, back to the bad title. I don't think the car was in any sort of serious accident as all the glass was original at the time (the body shop managed to break, not just the windshield, but also the passenger door glass (this restoration has been hard on me).  What I think happened was the car was stolen, valdalized and later recovered. I think the theives hit a curb because the front airdam was missing when I got the car and there was some home remedy work to attempt to patch the lower front nose of the car. They also stole the radio, and unfortuantely in the process of taking it the broke the entire dash into two parts.  I actually had to get a dash from a wreched S1 that was damaged on the opposite side and graft the two together to make one perfect dash. 

The car was sold to me with a tan leather interior with some brown house carpet. It was, well not great. 

At the time I planned to just make a driver out of the car and was willing to live with the interior as-is. But then one day I was looking the car over and thought to myself, there has to be something under this awful tan interior. I peeled back some of the leather on the glovebox lid to see. I could not believe it when it exposed green cloth. Previous research told me that this car was built too late to be a green tartan interior. But the proof was there. I slowly peeled back other pieces looking for more proof. 

The headliner was intact and not faded, but someone had sprayed adhesive all over it to attach the tan leather. The back of the headliner had 351H written on it. Confirming this was in fact a factory white/green car, just like the James Bond car. 

This little piece turned out to be immensely valuable as it gave the upholstery shop an example of the tartan spacing, as well as the upholstery techniques. 

I scoured the internet for every photo of a taratan S1 that I could find and built a small photobook to give to the upholstery shop (Extreme Auto Upholstery in Denton, TX).  Luckily I was able to source the new green clotch and tartan material from SJ Sportscars in the UK. They get it from the original loomers that made it back in 1977! Of course, this took months to source. All in the new interior was around $30,000. Good luck finding a competent shop to do it cheaper. By the end of that project the upholstery shop took me back through my own flip book and pointed out lots of errors made by other people attempting to restore these cars!

My intention is to keep adding to this page.