Joe Ellis – "I was at 180 on the speedo. After that I just went for it"

Meet the plucky Brit who took a Lotus Carlton far too fast for its own good on a wild road race across the Mojave Desert

- By Jack Phillips

Houston', later of Venom fame, doing the race in a Mitsubishi 3000GT, and the story captured my imagination. A friend relocated to Texas and some time later asked me to visit, so I went and spoke to one of [Hennessey's] managers. They told me all about it, and suggested I contact the Nevada tourist board: I got hold of them via fax and they invited me over. On my next holiday I rented a car, drove up and met some people involved, saw the race and helped out."

As in all good race paddocks, the welcome turned into badgering to take part the following year. "Some people use rental cars," explains Ellis, "strapping a roll cage into a Viper. I found this place called Rent-a-Vette and had a horribly tired wreck of a C4. It wasn't tremendous, but I entered the 105 mph class or something, put the stickers on, did the race, took them off, said 'thank you very much' and gave it back. I'd at least got my experience to come back."

The badgering ramped up and the organisers wanted to see their Brit in something British, and for Ellis there was only one real solution: "I'd raced Vauxhalls, and top of the tree was the Lotus Carlton. I knew that tuning a car to go faster is always fraught with reliability and development issues, and how can you test for an event doing a consistent 90 miles? A lot of the people who did it spent a lot of time breaking down before they had a car that could finish. It's the same speed, it's very hot and dry, so we thought of the Lotus Carlton because it has the power and the aerodynamics. I wanted to do it with lots of steel around me, for safety, and the only other possibility was a Bentley Turbo R."