Driving on Christmas day is the best – especially in a 1960s F2 car

You can’t take a Lotus F2 car around Hampshire these days – but Christmas is still the best day for a blast

On Christmas Day, 1957, Denis Jenkinson, a correspondent for Autocar’s one-time sister publication Motorsport, set off for a quiet country drive from The Phoenix Inn in Hartley Wintney. 
Nothing too unusual about that, until you learn that the resulting loop of Hampshire was conducted in a Lotus 12 single-seater, as raced by Graham Hill in Formula 2 events that year.
The car had been delivered on a trailer attached to a Ford Consul, driven from Hethel to Hampshire by Lotus chief Colin Chapman – and Jenkinson claimed to have topped 120mph somewhere just outside of Basingstoke before a driveshaft failure ended his jaunt some 30 miles into a planned 180-mile circuit.
Technically there weren’t any speed limits back then but, even considering that and the pretence of a trade plate carried by Jenkinson, the whole exercise was of course hugely and blatantly illegal. But Jenkinson pul