Back in January, we ran a story about favorite racecars and asked RACER.com readers to select their top five. Your votes flooded in and, in the end, we had more than 400 different racecars to consider… but 10 clear favorites emerged.

Many of you had found it tricky to narrow your favorites down to just five, yet some of you had a clear No. 1 and no others. And, like ours, many of your selections were ones that fulfilled multiple criteria from a personal point of view – aesthetic beauty, period when you were first becoming addicted to racing, success, livery, piloted by your heroes. We understand, completely!

Your favorite racecars #10: Porsche 956/962

Your favorite racecars #9: Chaparral 2K

Your favorite racecars #8: Lotus 49

Your favorite racecars #7: Lola T70

Your favorite racecars #6: Ford GT40

Your favorite racecars #5: Porsche 917K

Your favorite racecars #4: Ferrari 330 P3/P4

3. Lotus 38

The Lotus 29 had confirmed the concept of a rear-/mid-engined car at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The 34 had shown what not to do – namely swapping from Firestone to Dunlop without adequate testing. And then the 38 sealed the deal – a win in the greatest race of all. Now, almost 50 years on, RACER/RACER.com readers have voted Colin Chapman’s third Indy car at No. 3 in their all-time list of Favorite Racecars.

How the wheel turns! Lotus was not exactly pilloried for the way its 1963 Lotus 29 kept up with the far more powerful roadsters of the day at the Indianapolis 500, but certainly Colin Chapman’s gang wasn’t made welcome that first year. It just seemed too easy, too foreign and too untraditional at a venue with over a half a century of brick-built tradition.

Jack Brabham’s performance in 1961 had first shown the potential of the mid/rear-engined concept at the Brickyard. Despite his 171 cu. in. (2.8-liter) Climax-engined Cooper T54 being burdened with a 200hp deficit, and being 8-10mph down on terminal speed at the end of the two straights compared with the roadsters, it was that same amount quicker through the turns. As a result, “Black Jack” qualified 13th and finished ninth – pretty impressive for an underpowered, modified F1 car.

So after Dan Gurney had urged Chapman (RIGHT, with Clark in ’65) to visit the “500” in ’62, “Chunky” did the obvious math. If he brought a highly modified and strengthened Lotus 25-type chassis to carry on smoking the roadsters through the turns but used a more powerful engine to get closer to matching the big boys’ straightline performance, suddenly racing’s biggest payout could be heading back across the Atlantic. A couple months later, Gurney and Chapman headed to Dearborn, Mich., and convinced Ford to build a very heavily modified version of the Fairlane’s 256 cu.in. (4.2-liter) motor.

With this 370hp unit, the Lotus 29s of Jimmy Clark (LEFT) and Gurney qualified fifth and 12th and finished second and seventh in that first year and the combo of Parnelli Jones and Ol’ Calhoun – A.J. Watson's gorgeous front-engined roadster – only just beat the British invasion, despite Parnelli being a genuine genius of a driver with around 80hp extra from his Offenhauser. Chapman's math had not been faulty. At Milwaukee in August, Clark and Gurney locked out the front row and Clark won; at Trenton one month later, again the Lotus pair dominated qualifying although neither car finished. But the writing was on the concrete walls surrounding every oval in America: the revolution was here.

Ford’s quad-cam, fuel-injected V8 for the 1964 Lotus 34 would surely have allowed Clark and Gurney to blow everyone into the weeds at Indy, given that it produced 425hp. But Chapman had already inadvertently killed Lotus’s chances that year with a move from Firestone to the grippier but less durable Dunlops. Clark and Gurney qualified first and sixth, but Dan had discovered on full tanks that his tires were overheating and losing chunks of tread. Dunlop honorably and swiftly came up with an alternative compound and design, but it wasn’t enough. Clark led but the vibrations caused by the tires losing rubber and going out of balance caused his rear suspension to collapse just before quarter-distance and Gurney’s car was retired as a safety precaution just past half-distance. In truth, the excellent Bobby Marshman (RIGHT, chasing Clark), who’d qualified second could have netted that win: he was using last year’s Lotus 29 but with the new quad-cam Ford and running on Firestone rubber. That seemed like the perfect lineup, but Marshman retired with failed transmission.

However, the inherent rightness of the Lotus 34 was proven by Parnelli, as he used a Lotus to dominate at Milwaukee and Trenton. The following year, A.J. Foyt, who’d scored the last Indy win for the roadsters a year earlier, used a 34 to beat Clark to pole for the “500.” In fact, five of the top seven places on the grid for the 1965 Indy 500 were from Lotus. But it was Jimmy’s new 38 that dominated.

Designer Len Terry, who’d just finished helping Colin Chapman evolve the 1963 F1 World Championship-winning Lotus 25 into the 33, had been assigned the task of designing the 38, and what emerged was a sleeker-looking car than its two predecessors. Its nose was longer and its air intake narrower because, unlike in the 29 and the 34, the Ford engine in the 38 would be running methanol, which runs cooler, allowing for a smaller radiator.

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