Lotus Elise Sport 135 - What Makes a Lotus Special

I have always admired Lotus cars and had determined long ago that I would own at least one of their remarkable cars during my lifetime. I admired - and still admire - everything that Colin Chapman infused into his company and his cars: their approach to car design and construction ("Performance through light weight", "Simplify, then add lightness"), the beautiful simplicity, the deliberate deployment of technology, the cleverness of the ideas, and the relentlessness of their pursuit of light weight. I admire the cars themselves, especially the unique driving experience. Every Lotus has a uniquely "Lotus" driving experience: visceral, pure, delicate, precise, almost telepathic. Nothing I've ever driven comes close to the Lotus driving experience...

"Nothing I've ever driven comes close to the perfectly visceral driving experience of a Lotus"

Every Lotus (pre-Geely of course) is perfectly imperfect, and unashamedly built to Colin Chapman's foundational principle of performance through light weight. There is a very obvious DNA connecting every Lotus ever built, and no car drives quite like a Lotus. They have to be experienced to be truly appreciated let alone understood. Critics are, more often than not, ham-fisted luddites obsessed with only power and outright speed. The finesse, nuance, delicacy and artistry of a Lotus is totally lost on them, like the exquisite harmonies of Pachelbel's Canon are totally lost on a death metal obsessive. There's nothing wrong with loving brute power and speed, but that's not what a Lotus is about.

"A Lotus tolerates being taken by the scruff of its neck, but it prefers being an equal partner in the fight against physics..."

Drive a Lotus - any pre-Geely Lotus - and you'll see what I mean. They all share an uncanny delicacy of steering feel, fizzing with feedback but not in a bad way, combined with an almost alarming precision and immediacy of response. It almost always takes a few hundred metres to recalibrate myself to the Elise if I've not driven it for a while. The benchmark has to be the Elan S1, but the Elise S2 is not far behind. Then there's the poise of the chassis; being sofly sprung but stiffly damped (a Lotus characteristic), the car feels invariably stiffly suspended but when you launch it into a corner, especially long, high-speed corners, you realise how incredibly compliant the suspension is and how much stability it endows the car. Even with a short wheelbase, the car is much more stable than it has any right to be. These cars are so forgiving to poor driving inputs, but so incredibly rewarding to the driver who pays attention and drives deliberately. The Elise S2, though, is not a car that tolerates indecision on the controls - timidity is punished with severe understeer, but that disappears the instant that the driver is forthright and purposeful with his/her inputs. It tolerates being grabbed by the scruff of the neck, it prefers being an equal partner in the fight against physics.

"The only issues I've ever had were a near-failure of the Rover head gasket and a corroded radiator pipe, but it's never let me down..."

Finally, the Lotus ownership experience is so easy. The cars are so wonderfully simple, the engineering so thoroughly well developed, that the car is totally reliable and always on its best behaviour if it's given at least regular (at least annual) maintenance along with regular use. In my 20 year ownership journey, the only problems I've had have been a head gasket near-failure on the Rover K-series engine (easy to detect and prevent catastrophic failure) and a corroded radiator pipe that needed replacement. The rest has been plain sailing, and the car has never let me down - even on regular long runs to Luxembourg and back in all weathers.