Lola Cars is turning its 1960s T70 into a 16-car continuation run, and the interesting bit is not another expensive nostalgia machine for people with fireproof underwear. Matt Faulks, Lola’s executive innovation director, says the company has reworked how the car is made, using solar-derived magnesium and a natural-fiber body material while still satisfying historic racing rules.
The original T70 arrived in 1965. Lola built more than 100 examples, and the car became a serious tool in Can-Am sprint racing and endurance events including Le Mans and Daytona. The new run comes as Lola rebuilds after its 2022 bankruptcy and joins other historic marques selling officially sanctioned continuation cars.
Lola plans two versions. The T70S is configured for historic racing and comes with the FIA paperwork needed for that category. The T70S GT is a UK road-legal variant. Both are meant to look and feel like a mid-1960s sports racer, which is a polite way of saying there is very little room for modern car nonsense unless Lola can hide it.
Lower-carbon materials, not just retro cosplay
Faulks told Ars Technica that Lola focused on magnesium because race cars of the period used a lot of magnesium alloy, and conventional production can carry a dirty emissions bill. Instead of using magnesium made through the Pidgeon process, Lola extracts magnesium from seawater with electrolysis powered by solar energy.
According to Faulks, that route produces magnesium ingots with far lower carbon and pollution costs than standard methods. He also said Lola avoids environmentally damaging shielding gases in the smelting stage and uses a less harmful shielding gas when casting parts.
The bodywork also departs from the original recipe. The 1960s T70 used fiberglass because carbon fiber had not become the default racing material. For the continuation car, Lola developed a composite system with basalt outer layers, flax inner layers and a PFA resin derived from sugarcane, according to Faulks.
Lola is not claiming that material as a structural replacement for carbon fiber. Faulks said it is being used for body panels, interior trim and seat backs. He said it beats fiberglass on tensile strength and stiffness, and that finished panels coming out of the tooling are more stable and cleaner than original glass-reinforced plastic parts when compared with an original T70 at Lola.
In a lifecycle analysis report, Lola says the material changes cut the T70S cradle-to-gate carbon footprint by 54 percent versus a car built with traditional materials. The company puts the resulting footprint at 4.6 metric tons of CO2e.
A modern V8 and a fake-mechanical shifter
The road-going T70S GT keeps the small-block Chevy layout but uses a modern GM 6.2-liter V8 for emissions compliance and street manners. Lola gives the road car 500 hp and 455 lb-ft of torque. The racing T70S makes 530 hp and 400 lb-ft.
Both versions use a Hewland transmission. For the T70S GT, Lola had a problem: the relevant gearbox is sequential, which does not match the car’s period presentation. Faulks said Lola’s answer is a fly-by-wire H-pattern selector. The driver moves a lever that feels like an old T70 shifter, but there is no mechanical linkage to the gearbox.
That electronic layer lets the car block destructive mis-shifts, such as selecting second when fourth was intended. Faulks said a track mode also supports full-throttle upshifts, throttle blips on downshifts and buffered downshifts, allowing a driver to request a lower gear and let the system select gears as braking makes them safe.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
