Mike, I, too, have the same thing, although the earlier cars might be different. I queried Tim Wilkes (Sprint registrar) about this and his reply is this (start at the bottom with my question). .
Hi Greg
Thanks for your interesting message. Elans stopped having chassis numbers way before the Sprint came along so I do not feel that is the answer to your conundrum!
I looked at examples I have of factory works sheets to see if there may be a clue there, but none had a number that would correspond closely to the one on your car. I then realised that the number was very close to the last S4 unit number before the 'new' unit number system came in in January 1970, 9832. Given that we know a good number of earlier Federal Sprints were in fact converted S4s, I therefore suspect that 9665 refers to a late S4 unit number. So how come it's on your car?
Well the first thought would be that at some stage your car had a replacement chassis and that it came from a donor car or from a store held by the Lotus importer. However, I think that an unlikely explanation, so my next thought is that your car was made up at the factory in January 1972 from parts that were available, which included the 'old' numbered chassis 9665 that had never been used in production. From the information I have there is no data recorded against 9665 (it is in a batch of 45 such unit numbers of the same time), so this may be a feasible explanation, as the majority of Federal Sprints appear to have come off the Hethal production line in quarter four of 1971, including those that were converted S4s.
I hope this goes some way to attempting to explain the number on your chassis. The truth is that we shall probably never know for sure what happened. One project I have for the future is to interview remaining ex-Lotus factory workers to try to find answers to this and other conundrums we have been presented with by Lotus!
Best wishes
Tim
On 25 May 2011 00:51, Greg Zelazek <
[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Tim,
I noticed that my car, 0243K, Federal dhc '72 Sprint, also has a chassis number stamped on the horizontal flange by the sway bar mount. My chassis number is 9665. Is this a bit of info that can be added to the Sprint registry?
I wonder if other Federal or five digit vin'ed cars also have this chassis number? What do you think?
Thanks,
Greg Zelazek