Alright. Story time. If you aren't interested, disregard this. However I feel this is a humorous story that is now cemented in the history of this car, and it wouldn't be right to leave out of a thread supposedly chronicling the history of this car.
The main events in this story all took place just under 6 months ago - May 26, 2019.
It was the end of my senior year of high school. My girlfriend and I were in the awkward part of our relationship where we weren't officially dating yet. It was a fun ritual: we would get out of school (I drove the Elan so I always snuck out a couple of minutes early to get the tonneau off or put the top down depending on what the weather was that day so that I could beat the traffic... and maybe also show off a little bit to everyone who was just getting out as the bell rang
) while she usually stayed after for honors society or club meetings, and we would go our separate ways for a few hours. Later on in the day we would usually meet up for dinner at the local burger joint and pass the time there, sometimes going out for evening drives afterwards in the Elan if it wasn't too late and the weather was nice.
All in all, it was a good time to be alive.
Anyways, 4 days after we went on what I now suppose was technically our first date, there was a neighborhood gathering of sorts going on at her house and I was invited. I pulled up to the house, and parked at the end of the driveway on the curb (it was a housing development, not a main road). Some time later, maybe a couple of hours, she and I were sitting at the edge of the pool and her dad walks over to me, leans in, and says, "Is that your little car?"
I didn't know where this was going but I was already uncomfortable. I replied, "Yes..."
He explained to me what happened: He had a 2006 Mustang that he was selling, so he had parked it down on the street to show to a prospective buyer who had come that morning. Later on, someone commented to him that they thought he left one of the interior lights on. So he went down to the street to check (there were no lights on, for the record) and then figured that as long as he was down there he might as well pull it back into the driveway. I mentioned before that my car was parked at the end of the driveway... as he was turning left pulling into the driveway he hit/scraped the corner of the left rear bumper of the Lotus with the front fender area of the Mustang as he cut the corner.
The damage could not have been more ironic. Due to the rear bumper shape on the Elan, the only damage was a scrape down to primer on the "crease" which was barely noticeable because the bumper is silver lacquer over gray primer. No fiberglass damage that I could see, even after taking the bumper off. The Mustang however had three small but very noticeable dents in the fender area and a small line where the paint was taken off. I never would have been able to come up with an accident scenario between two vehicles in which an Elan comes out on top, but apparently this was it.
He had sold the Mustang for $10,000 that morning too... when the buyer returned to pay and pick it up, my girlfriend's father had to knock $500 off of that because of the new dents...
Anyways, I wasn't upset. What was there to be upset over? There was virtually no damage to my car. I actually felt bad for her dad. I fixed the bumper the next weekend by getting out my leftover can of silver lacquer from when the bumpers were painted and a fine brush and touched it up by hand. Good as new. Besides, I think that we both came out of it looking pretty good insofar as I didn't get upset and he was very nice and kind to me.
TL;DR the first time I met my girlfriend's dad was when he hit my Elan.
-Ben