(September 22, 2026) – Lotus had already proven the case for a mid-engined layout in Formula 1 by the early 1960s — Stirling Moss took the Lotus 18 to victory at the 1960 Monaco Grand Prix — but it took until the Europa’s arrival for that thinking to reach a Lotus road car. As Britain’s first mid-engined sports car, the Europa set the template that nearly every subsequent Lotus, aside from the front-engined Elite and the brand’s modern EVs, would follow.

The Europa’s chassis was a steel backbone, clothed in fiberglass bodywork built with function well ahead of form. Early cars bonded the body to the chassis for extra stiffness, though that gave way to a simpler bolted assembly as Lotus looked for ways to trim cost. Up front, the Europa ran wishbones and coilover dampers; out back, it borrowed the Elan’s Chapman strut design, a layout that had originated in Lotus’s single-seaters.

Despite its competition-derived platform, the original Europa was no powerhouse. Its 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine and four-speed transaxle were both sourced from the Renault 16, good for just 77 horsepower — offset, in classic Colin Chapman fashion, by a curb weight of only 612 kg (1,349 pounds), roughly 1,000 pounds lighter than a base 2026 Mazda Miata. The Series 2 cars picked up a further five horsepower from the same Renault engine, and it wasn’t until the twin-cam version arrived, running a Ford-sourced, Lotus-tuned 1.6-liter engine, that the Europa finally broke the 100-horsepower mark.

Even as primarily a road car, the Europa built a genuine competition record: it won on its first outing at Brands Hatch in 1966 and took eight more race wins in 1967. That success led Lotus to build the Type 62, a dedicated sports-prototype racer based on the Europa. Only two were built, and between them they started 30 races, with a best finish of third.

It’s that pairing of road car and racer that inspired the single most extreme Europa build in the model’s history: the so-called Banks Europa, built by Banks Engineering. Owner Mark Edwards explains that Banks built roughly 26 Europa-based race cars in the mid-1990s for a Japanese racing series, followed by a small run of four or five road-legal versions patterned on that racer — itself conceived as a tribute to the 1969 Type 62. With its widened body, fat rear tires, side skirts, front splitter, and oversized rear wing, the Banks Europa looked nothing like the small, understated original it started life as, and it stood out sharply among the more conventional Europas gathered at Hampton Court Palace, roughly 12 miles from central London, for the model’s 60th-anniversary display.

Like the 1990s race cars it echoes, Edwards’s Banks Europa rides on a spaceframe chassis with fully independent wishbone suspension and adjustable coilovers, plus vented disc brakes at all four corners. Very little of the donor Europa survives the conversion — by Edwards’s account, only the chassis badge and windscreen are original — though the car remains registered as a 1969 Europa. Power comes from a two-liter, 16-valve Vauxhall Redtop engine producing roughly 185 brake horsepower, a deliberate nod to the original Type 62 racers, which experimented with the same Vauxhall four-cylinder. At just 1,832 pounds, the car is, in Edwards’s words, “very fast” and sounds the part.

The car’s history is almost as colorful as its bodywork. It was built for a private owner working with Banks, who died roughly 400 miles after the build was finished; his widow later sold it through Bonhams in 2022. The next owner upgraded the throttle bodies, spending around £5,000 (about $6,700 at current exchange rates) and adding another 700 miles before the car went into storage. Edwards found it with 1,100 miles on the clock and bought it last November after spotting the listing on PistonHeads, the British enthusiast site, and driving up to Cheshire to see it in person.

Edwards came to the Banks Europa after years showing a Marcos GT at the same event, a relationship he says has cooled as he’s drifted from that car’s community. Lotus ownership, by contrast, has suited him better — he describes the Lotus crowd as considerably friendlier — and once he’d tracked down this particular car, the sale came together quickly, sealed with a handshake before the car was delivered to him a couple of weeks later.

Source: Hagerty, reporting and photo by Nik Berg