RESTORATION IMAGES COURTESY OF LAURENCE CARBONETTI
When Laurence “Larry” Carbonetti bought his Lotus Elan Sprint off the showroom floor, he couldn’t envision that the little British convertible would be in his life for the next half-century. A few years after its arrival, and not long after it received a fresh performance-tuned engine and paint color change, the fiberglass-bodied two-seater would be parked since it wasn’t practical to drive while he and his wife, Jeanne were stick-building a new home. The couple constructed a special ground-floor room to hold the Elan, and that’s where it sat in suspended animation for decades.
“Time passed, and life went on,” Larry tells us. “Occasionally someone would ask what I planned to do with this car sitting in my basement. I didn’t know. I walked past it so many times through the years. Jeanne tried to encourage me by asking, ‘What are you thinking about doing with that car? You’d probably have fun if you drove it again!’ I did know that, as time passed, the work to return it to the road would grow.”
