Lola Cars Ltd is an iconic British name when it comes to motorsport, building cars for nearly every formula of racing between 1958 until 2012. The storied brand had successes in sportscars, single seaters, Formula 1 cars and even took home the Indy 500 trophy three times, before it disappeared behind the Lola workshop shutter doors.  

However, the Broadley family name lives on, none more so than through the heritage vehicles that are lucky enough to have survived, hidden away in dry storage until the opportunity comes to share the ubiquitous Lola name. The car, a chassis numbered a Lola T620, built by Eric Broadley and his son Andrew in the Lola Factory prior to being tested, developed and raced by Andrew. 

Andrew commented, “I wanted to go racing and I had this kind of need inside me, it took me a while to find out what I could do that wouldn’t cost a lot of money and I found this chassis laying up in a storage area, it was the last run of the T620 Super V manufacturing, number 53, they changed the rules, it didn’t sell and just sat there collecting dust. I drove Gerrit Van Kouwen’s car at the Formula Ford Festival at Silverstone Club, I got half a day’s testing there, sat in the car with Dad and wondered what to do… I dug out the chassis, found the old drawings of the car and mix and matched different categories of the car parts to put the thing together. It was horrendously slow! But I gradually got better at it, and it turned into a fantastic year. 

“What I really enjoyed was going through the whole process of what I’d done all those years ago. If I was going to do it today, I would have had a thousand photographs and notes. At the time for me it was ordinary what I was doing, that was the life I was living, motor racing was normal for me – it didn’t even occur to me that I should write anything down!  

“Based on the fact that the car was essentially already built, and I had to make some parts, get the engine in, and make sure that it worked, it took about four months. I showed up at a Formula Libre race in early March of 1985, after my Uni semester ended. Then we went through a lightening phase as the car was much too heavy to be racing against Formula Fords, we split it in half essentially. Three weeks later we showed up at Silverstone and stuck it fourth on the grid! I do have to credit Jim Russell as I did a racing day with him and at the end of the day he said ‘I’m worried about you Andrew, as I didn’t stick to the rules! It taught me an awful lot without knowing it.” 

The car was crashed on the grid at Lydden Hill, and had sat in storage units from 1990 until now. The T620 has since been restored, boasting a Ford Kent engine and is ready to get back out on the track. 

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