Just the thing for dreary February – a Sunbeam to brighten up your day. Brought to you with kind permission from Belgian snapper Maarten Vogels, he caught this excursion into the kitty litter in dramatic style. It’s probably a moment Dutch driver Anita Renes would rather forget but at least it made for a spectacular image. Kudos to her too for keeping her foot in!
It’s a poignant reminder of one of the great Lotus engineering projects. The base Chrysler Sunbeam was a very humble starting point but Lotus transformed it into something so extraordinary that it must have been quite outrageous back in 1979. Imagine unleashing a 16v, 150bhp rear-wheel-drive hatch in the days when the front-wheel-drive, 110bhp VW Golf GTi was considered a bit of a weapon! Remember the stir caused by the 150bhp Astra GTE 16v? That was launched nearly a decade later! Even now with that dog-leg gearbox and 2.2 litre, longitudinally mounted Lotus twin-cam, the specs are pretty mouthwatering. As you can see, these pocket rockets are still raced and rallied competitively to this day.
To download it, simply click the thumbnail below, then, once opened, right click and ‘save as’.
Many thanks again to Maarten for the shot. For a wealth of other motorsport images look no further than belgian-motorsport.com. Maarten’s social media links are here:
www.youtube.com/MVdesign
facebook.com/belgian-motorsport
www.flickr.com/photos/belgian-motorsport/sets/
www.instagram.com/belgianmotorsport/
The Facebook page of the team that run this Sunbeam can be found here, and their website here.
If you’d like a picture considered for our PoTM features, details and an upload gallery can be found here.
You can view the full Picture of The Month archive of scrumptious screensavers here!
