I had seen this well-used Lotus 18 sitting in a grumpy little foreign car repair shop hard along Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, California. The guy who owned the shop and the Lotus was named “Buck” something or another as I recall. I kept driving by and looking at that machine every few weeks, and one day I finally stopped to ask after the price (I didn’t have it, of course), and the history of the lime-gold-colored racecar with the…

Period shot shows Stokes and his Lotus at speed, racing at Riverside.