Iron Cross wheel centre logo colour

[Alan_M]

The ones on my 82 Excel are gold on silver background (photo below). Is the gold the original colour, or is it possibly black or another colour that has faded?

[tezzan]

The ones on my 82 Excel are gold on silver background (photo below). Is the gold the original colour, or is it possibly black or another colour that has faded?

On my 84 MY they look the same as yours:



and almost all the other ones I've seen IRL and on the web look the same. However I've seen a couple of exceptions - I noticed these on a New Zealand auction site (on an 85 Excel apparently):



and on the original UK Lotus sales material from 1984 they look like this:



So I think yours (and mine) are standard and not faded. But were the brochure ones just pre-production mock-ups? Pity we can't ask someone from the factory.

And the NZ ones - did someone just get them made up?

I must admit I think I prefer the ones in the sales brochure if anything, they look a bit classier.

[Alan_M]

Thanks Tezzan.

After your post I remembered I had a Lotus engineering prospectus and had a look in there. Found the following photo of cars going through quality control showing an Excel with iron cross wheels. So would assume this is a production car.
So, I think, maybe they were originally black on silver. The wheels on mine are possibly the first set ever fitted to an Excel as it was the factory engineering prototype.
Don’t think those NZ ones are correct

[tezzan]

I always thought it a bit unlikely that every set of wheel centres would fade in exactly the same way, so I assumed gold was the orignal colour.

However maybe you're right, maybe they all started out as black on silver (or is it black on cream/white?).

I notice that isaydingdong does some wheel centre stickers in 60mm:


https://www.isaydingdong.co.uk/ourshop/ ... -of-4.html

They might be the ones that the NZ owner used?

I think isaydingdong also does custom sticker jobs - I wonder if it would be worth getting some made up as per the originals?