Ancient Web: CortinaLand Catalogued Lotus Cortinas by Plate and Paperwork
Bob Woolner's long-running Lotus Cortina hobby site collects identification plates, paint references, restoration reports, factory brochures, and vintage racing material.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
An old performance car has several identities: what the manufacturer advertised, what the factory built, and what decades of owners have changed. A dedicated enthusiast can spend a very long time telling them apart.
Bob Woolner's Lotus Cortina site greets visitors by joking that it is itself more than twenty-five years old and may need antique registration plates. Its homepage credits Woolner in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and carries a July 2024 update date. It has been touched recently, but it retains the structure of a traditional collector's website.
The menu starts with the restoration and ownership transfer of one car, then moves into identification, paint and interior information, engine blocks, electrical work, photographs, vintage racing, and historic brochures.
What an old number plate can tell you
The identification page links diagrams or photographs for different manufacturing periods: 1963–64 Mark I, 1965–66 Mark I, and Mark II. That is the sort of detail a collector needs when deciding whether a component or an entire vehicle is what its seller claims.
The Lotus Cortina Library takes a different route through the same history. It is an enormous list of printed ephemera: Ford sales brochures, 1964 price lists, 1960s motorsport advertising, service bulletins, owners' handbooks, workshop manual references, Lucas parts catalogs, postcards, trading cards, and specialist books.
It even files away items such as a Cortina postage stamp and period collector cards. Those are not central to repairing an engine, but they show what the car looked like as a cultural product rather than just a machine.
The site includes a page about the 1968 Baja 1000, presented as a story told by a participant at a later gathering. It also links to photographs of cars and meetings. Unlike a modern classified listing, this site has room for memories, technical minutiae, and old paper.
The owner asks that text and images not be copied without permission. Linking to the material respects that request while allowing visitors to see how thoroughly one enthusiast has organized a subject.
Open CortinaLand's paper archive.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
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