VintageLOTUSbicycles.com
Vintage Lotus Bicycles Home Page
Welcome to Vintage Lotus Bicycles website, dedicated to the Lotus Bicycles of the 1980's.
Initially, we had a difficult time trying to decide on the perfect photo for our VintageLOTUSbicycles.com Home Page. With so many cool Lotus Bicycles to choose from, it was indeed a tough decision. While searching for the perfect image to represent the entirety of Lotus Bicycles, we a came across this photo from the 1987 Lotus catalog.
What we did not realize at first, and what makes this photograph special, is that we're almost certain the gentleman in the photograph is Ernst Star, with his daughter Katharine, who would have been about that age in 1986.
If you love your Lotus bicycle you have this man and his father, Sidney Star, to thank.
To us, Lotus is more than a bicycle company, Lotus represents a father and son team proud of their product. If bicycles are in any way a significant part of your life, there probably is not one of us who would pass up the opportunity to experience what Sid and Ernst Star accomplished with Lotus Bicycles in the 1980's.
When you browse the pages on this website and look at all of the variety and all of the care given to designing the many different Lotus bicycles it becomes apparent that this was more than just another bicycle business. Lotus had Columbus frame tubing made in Italy and shipped all the way to Japan to build their frames, Lotus built small framed bicycles with 700c rear wheels and 24 inch front wheels for small riders. Lotus built the Super Pro Aero back when "aero" was unheard of in the bicycle community. Lotus even made bicycles with Cinelli in Italy. Lotus offered 22 different models of bicycles by 1987, something for everybody.
It's obvious to us that Lotus made bicycles because they loved bicycles, they were proud of their product, and quality and value were important.
Our goal is to provide a place on the web to locate information on classic Lotus bicycles built between 1980 and 1990, and to provide a place for fellow Lotus enthusiasts, or those curious about the brand, to share information.
We purchased our first Lotus in 1980, a Legend, and we've been fans ever since. If you are a vintage Lotus bicycle owner or enthusiast you probably already know that detailed information on the bikes is difficult to find.
We have a modest personal collection of information to upload, but we need your contributions! If you have any Lotus information you'd like to share (or even sell), or you'd just like to post a photo of your bike, we'd love to hear from you.
We're constantly updating the site and adding content but it's taking time to get everything the way we'd like it, for now some stuff has been uploaded and thrown in place just to have a representation of the model or just to have something on the site worth visiting. There are plenty of holes in our chronology of Lotus bicycles. In many cases the bicycles were somewhat limited in production and we're finding it difficult to acquire quality photos. A large percentage of photos in our collection are just too small or blurry to be of any significant use. Many have been so transformed that we feel they are no longer representative of that model when it was original.
Right now for every 800 page views we get on VintageLOTUSbicycles.com we've received one photo or Serial # Project contribution from a reader. Believe us when we tell you that we do a back flip out of the office chair when it's something we've been trying to find! So thank you to those who have contributed! We've had a few people already who have gone out of their way to send us custom photos or have torn their bike apart to find out information, we really appreciate your help.
At the moment we're working on trying to represent each model with a photo and trying to provide component charts when accurate information is available. Eventually we will add a Featured Bicycle link from each model page where we will have more detailed photos and enlargements of significant features of that model. If you'd like to work with us and have a relatively original vintage Lotus of any model, and can contribute some photos, we'd be glad to feature you and your bike here on the site. (You don't need to be a professional photographer, we just prefer large file sizes and we'll crop and edit the photos as needed). Perhaps we'll have to resort to bribery, we don't know.
If you're not finding the specific information you are looking for, please let us know and we'll try to answer your model questions or requests. We have more information that we just haven't had time to post on the site yet, but we're working on it.
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