Icons - Lotus

Owning a Lotus is a bona fide mark of petrol headed tendencies. No one will mistake you for someone who views cars as appliances if you own a Lotus. For as long as I have been reading them, car magazines have been pitching Hethel’s machines against Porsches, Ferraris and other exotica and drivers have been racing them in the same fashion. Yet in some ways, superficially, it seems hard to rationalise the company Lotus keeps.

In the 1960s for example, Ferrari was making the 365 GTB/4 which offered around 350 bhp. The Lotus Europa, on sale from Lotus during the same time frame, could muster a little over 100bhp. During the 1970s the Lamborghini Urraco had a 3.0 liter V8 that managed around 250bhp, whilst the new Lotus Esprit could summon only around 160bhp. Even after the Esprit gained a Garrett and broke the 200bhp mark, it was outmatched in outright power terms by the 911 Turbo, which started out at around 260bhp and was soon well over the 300-mark.

But to view Lotuses in this light is as pointless as criticising a leather-strapped Patek Phillippe for it’s failings as a diving watch. Or worrying that your hand-made shoes make poor soccer boots. Lotuses deserve to sit in exotic car showrooms, next to Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis for two reasons. One is their relationship to power versus weight.The other is their handling dynamics. These are the reasons that we love Lotus.

Beginning with the Mark VI, Lotus showed what could be done with a 50bhp Ford side-valve engine in a car that weighed less than 500 kilos. Yes the car itself looked a little like a soapbox racer, but in one of the most impressive of all automotive evolutions, that same basic shape is still now embarrassing 600 bhp supercars as a Caterham. It worked in the 1950s against XK140s and it still works more than 50 years later against Gallardos.

And then there’s the Elan. Now the only problem with a 1960s Elan is that if you’re any taller than the cast of Willow, it will look as though you’ve stolen your nephew’s pedal car. If you can ignore that you find a jewel-like, 700 kilo rocket. Still nowhere near hitting the 1 ton mark, the more powerful Elan’s had around 125bhp. Getting to 60 in under 8 seconds feels very quick in a pedal car. There’s just nothing made like this anymore. A Mazda MX5, one of the more basic 2 seater sports cars of the last 20 years weighed in at comfortably over 1000 kilos at its most basic and had little or no more power.

What the Elan and it’s predecessor the Elite also showed was that Lotus can do pretty cars too. It’s true that in this area things went a little south during the 1970s and 80s but few cars from any manufacturer have the delicacy and beautifully balanced proportions of an Elite or Elan. Rather like a vintage KrisKraft or Hughes H-1, when mechanical design is this good, it almost seems a pity to sully it with inconveniently shaped human beings at the controls, breaking up the flow of the lines.

Then came the Esprit, showing that you didn’t have to cloth your car in the most beautiful body ever penned in order to sear an image onto the retinas of a generation. The silhouette of the Lotus Esprit is one of the most immediately recognisable automotive designs ever. What the Esprit also underlined was the enduring logic behind Lotus’s low weight approach. The Esprit Sport 300 of 1993 squeezed, you’ve guessed it, 300 bhp out of the four cylinder engine. The car weighed a whisker under 1200 kilos. The result was 0-60 in 4.6 seconds and 0-100 in 11.7. The contemporary Ferrari 348 took 5.8 seconds and 13.7 seconds to cover the same increments and it would take the considerably more expensive Ferrari F355 to eclipse the Lotus.

And then in the mid-90s Lotus managed a new trick. Somehow condensing the light weight of the Mark VI, the aesthetic precision of the Elan, and the drama of the Esprit, Lotus produced the Elise. There are few cars as fascinating to look at as a Lotus Elise. The car showed that you could do muscular without being ostentatious, that you could have outrageous acceleration without outrageous cost and that purity of driving experience was still part of the engineering DNA at Lotus. If you valued being intimately connected to the road surface, being back in a car that offered you a seat, pedals and a view of the aluminium that supported you and being able to hear a small, violent 4 cylinder engine burn fuel a foot behind your head, then Lotus had what you needed.

If, after considering what the Elise had to offer and feeling that it was a little too... pedestrian for you, Lotus had that covered too. You could have an Exige. And if the Exige still felt rather “Driving Miss Daisy”, then there was the 340R. Nowhere perhaps is the Lotus philosophy more clearly observable than in this progression.

You buy a Lotus because what you really want, underneath the fleeting enjoyment of iPod connectivity, heated seats, dual-level air conditioning and sat-nav is to be back in the soap-box racer you had as a kid. To be sat back on the sled at the top of an icy hill with the adrenalin pumping. You want to be given a seat, a gear-stick and 3 pedals and Lotus will get you as close to that purity as you can stomach.

You can go all the way to the 2-Eleven and pick bugs from your teeth, or you can take the racing DNA, the handling balance, the luxury of a roof and leather interior and go Boxster hunting in an Evora. Buying a Lotus is not about the power output, or the top speed or getting the best valet spot. It is about combining engine, chassis, suspension and controls to distill, not dilute the driving experience.