[John Lindsay]

From Bill Hinshaw
First, I think the chassis # 100/49 was on a serial plate mounted to the firewall. However, I once looked into the Elva Owners' website and it was shown as having been once mine but listed as a Mk2. According to Rod Carveth (deceased some 10 years now but once the Elva distributor for this area and a friend of Carl Haas in Chicago, the U.S. importer) the factory did not receive new Mk3 ID plates in time to put them on the cars and so used surplus Mk 2 plates instead with the new Mk3 numbers stamped in.

The first owner, I believe, was a San Francisco social worker named Dan Abbott, who ran the car very unsuccessfully in 1960. Not the car's fault, either, but Dan did his best to stay out of the way, at least. He sold it to Bob Potter, an SCCA driver and used car trader in Oakland. I found it sitting on a trailer at the back of Bob's lot and traded a salvaged Morgan +4 for it. My first run with it was on Sunday at the Stockton event in early '61, my Porsche entry having expired in the Ladies' Race on Saturday. I had done no prep work at all on the Elva and subsequently found that it overheated quickly and so I retired it.

It wasn't until later in "61 that I got a chance to work on the engine, and found on removal of the cyl. head that two of the liners had sunk into the block. Since I had already entered the car for a race at Cotati I took a shortcut "Joe McGee" fix and cut shims from old coffee can lids and stuck them to the tops of the sunken liners with aluminum spray paint and then laid a head gasket on top of that. Amazingly the car seemed to run quite well as we did tests up & down the alley behind Rod Carveth's shop.

Saturday at Cotati came and the car proved a reasonable contender to season's points-leader John Miller in his Lotus Eleven but the clutch was failing fast. That night a shop owner in Santa Rosa made his place available and a group of friends & I installed a new clutch - an MGTD or A, I think - and on Sunday we had a new winner. Miller and I were both equally amazed. Shortly thereafter the Elva Mk6 was announced and I ordered one through Carveth. By December the Mk3 was sold to a guy from Salt Lake City. I should have kept it.
Bill Hinshaw