Entry 046 · Nethercutt Collection · 1962
The 1962 Lotus Model 19 Monte Carlo, the race car J.B. Nethercutt drove himself.
A mid-engine Coventry Climax-powered sports racer designed by Colin Chapman as the successor to the Lotus 15. J.B. Nethercutt, the Merle Norman heir who built the collection, campaigned this car personally in period. The founder was a racer before he was a curator.
This is not a Porsche and it is not a Rolls-Royce. Read the placard. It is a 1962 Lotus Model 19 Monte Carlo, a mid-engine Coventry Climax-powered sports racer designed by Colin Chapman, and this specific chassis was campaigned in period by J.B. Nethercutt himself. The founder of the collection was a racing driver before he was a curator. The car is here because he raced it.
Chapman's answer to the front-engine roadster.
By 1960 the sports racing car had gone mid-engine. Cooper had proven it in Formula One. Lotus followed with the Type 19, a direct successor to the Lotus 15. Colin Chapman's obsession was low mass and low frontal area. The Model 19 sat 30 inches tall at the top of the roll bar, weighed about 1,100 pounds dry, and put a 2.5-liter Coventry Climax FPF four-cylinder immediately behind the driver's shoulders. The power-to-weight ratio matched a contemporary Formula One car.
Why it was called the Monte Carlo.
Lotus named the Model 19 the "Monte Carlo" after Stirling Moss's win at the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix in the closely related Lotus 18 Formula One car. The Model 19 dominated club and professional sports car racing in the United States in 1961 to 1963, winning at Nassau, Riverside, Laguna Seca, and elsewhere in the hands of drivers like Dan Gurney, Jim Hall, and Roger Penske. It was one of the last sports racers competitive at the front of the field before the arrival of the Chaparral 2A and the McLaren Elva.
J.B. Nethercutt behind the wheel.
J.B. Nethercutt inherited the Merle Norman Cosmetics fortune from his aunt and used it, from the 1950s onward, to assemble the greatest private collection of pre-war and mid-century automobiles in the United States. What is less well known is that he was a serious amateur racing driver. He raced this Lotus 19 personally in period. He also campaigned Duesenbergs at Pebble Beach at 130 mph. He was, in the vintage sports car world, exactly the kind of collector who bought cars because he wanted to drive them very quickly, not because he wanted to look at them.
Why the car is displayed exactly where it is.
Every other car in the Grand Salon is a pre-war coachbuilt sculpture. The Lotus 19 is a stripped racing car with a fibreglass shell and an exposed roll bar. It sits in the collection as evidence that the collector himself raced. That is the personal signature of the whole Nethercutt collection: it is not a rich man's investment portfolio. It is a driver's library. The Duesenbergs were bought by a man who could drive a Duesenberg hard. The Model 19 was bought because he already had.
The correction.
If the article at this URL previously described this car as a Porsche or a Rolls-Royce, that was wrong. The placard in front of it identifies it as a 1962 Lotus Model 19 Monte Carlo raced by J.B. Nethercutt. Fixing this is the point of doing the archive first-hand. Read the placard. Trust the machine, not the file name.
"The collector who built one of the great museums of the automobile also drove a mid-engine racing car in period. The archive was built by a driver. That is why it feels like it was built by someone who understood."
Omar Mukhtar, field note
Background reading
For further reading: search the public record for 1962 Lotus Model 19 Monte Carlo, and visit the Nethercutt Collection, where Omar studied and photographed this material first-hand.
Copyright
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