This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes, ... and seawater?

That process also avoids the use of shielding gases in smelting, and Faulks says that for casting, Lola uses a shielding gas that isn’t environmentally damaging. Then there’s the bodywork; in the 1960s, Lola used fiberglass, as carbon fiber hadn’t yet caught on. Now, it’s using a new composite it developed itself. “It’s a combined fiber system with basalt outer layers, flax inner layers, which is acting kind of like an Aramid, and then a PFA resin system that’s derived from sugarcane. So rather than just being a material, it is a system that you can go make parts with, and we’re running this on cars now,” Faulks said. The road-going T70S GT might be a little harder to squeeze through US regulations than the UK’s more permissive approach to small-volume manufacturers. It has kept a Chevy small block V8 in the back, but one of GM’s modern 6.2 L V8s that meets emissions and offers modern driveability, rather than the 5 L racing engine. The road car is down on power—500 hp (372 kW) versus 530 hp (395 kW) for the T70S—but up on torque, with 455 lb-ft (616 Nm) compared to the T70S’s 400 lb-ft (542 Nm). And like the T70S, the T70S GT uses a Hewland transmission. The only problem was that the specific model of transmission was sequential, and that wouldn’t be at all in keeping with the mid-’60s vibes.