Do you ever look at our big group tests and wonder how difficult it must be to get all those cars together?
I do and I've been doing it for years.
Truth is it can be a nightmare. There are people I consider "specialists" at gathering huge numbers of cars together for a big shoot – Andrew Roberts springs to mind – but for the most part anything more than a handful of classics needs to be a group effort.
There are exceptions, of course, when things just fall into place thanks to generous and amenable owners or dealers.
But nothing in my 16 years on C&SC prepared me for the response we had for a feature in the imminent July issue of the magazine.
After all, I had (over)confidently been saying for months that getting five, maybe even six key Lotus Elans together for a 50th birthday party would be no problem. Just tell me the time and place and I'd sort it.
But as time wore on and the venue was only confirmed less than two weeks before the shoot, even I was starting to wonder if my confidence was misplaced. Not least because we wanted owner cars not dealer cars and they are always that bit more difficult to organise.
Well, not always.
I had been talking to Alan Morgan from Club Lotus about something else and he just mentioned that if I was struggling to find any particular cars I should give him shout and he'd see what he could do to help.
