Lotus: The next step

Inside Story Lotus Concept

Lotus is drawing up plans for a radical, super-light, super-fast, Elise based sports car to go on display at this year's NEC motor show. And it's asked Autocar to help with the design, reports Steve Cropley

A brilliant new Lotus sports car, lighter and faster than the Elise but more expensive and more radically styled, will make its debut at the British Motor Show later this year. lotus's designers and engineers are working around the clock on the car, which until now has been a closely guarded secret. If successful as a concept, the new roadster could be in production within 18 months.

The car, tipped to be called Elise 340R, will use much reworked Elise mechanicals, including a 40 per cent more powerful engine and suspension tuned for even sharper, more track orientated handling. There will be no doors, no roof, and only a minimal windscreen. The whole thing will be harder edged and rather less practical than the existing Elise, which will continue to be the Lotus to choose as day-to-day transport. The 340R's sole option will be a Track Pack, consisting of an FIA approved roll bar, racing harnersses, a spare set of wheelswith "qualifying" tyres, track club membership and performance driving tuotion from one of Lotus's experts, such as Roger Becker, Alistair McQueen or ex-Formula 1 driver John Miles.

"The Elise 340R will be the perfect choice for people who truly love driving. Its owners will be the kind of people who understand that if you want the best, you have to pay for it," says project spokesman Colin Goodwin.

Colin Goodwin ? Yep, you read correctly. Autocar's Elise driving senior scribbler is a leading light in the Elise 340R project, along with other Autocar sports car fans Stephen Sutcliffe, Kieth Howard and me.

Ordinarily a motoring magazine ouldn;t have all the details of a project like this until the car was ready to be unveiled, but when Lotus managing director Chris Knight decided to use the Elise formula to attract a whole new group of customers, he invited the car nuts at Autocar to help design the car that would appeal to them.

It was an extraordinary offer. Use the resources of Lotus Design to shape the car you believe would work in the market, said Knight. Use the whole prject to show how a low-volume sports car takes its journey from idea to running prototype. As you can imagine, we jumped in with both feet. All eight feet, in fact.

It's an awesome thing, being involved in the creation of a new vehicle which might find its way into the showrooms. Yet what struck us was how matter of fact are the people who do it for a living. By the time the Autocar quartet had agreed on a day for the first conference and started getting its deas straight, the seven-strong Lotus team - design boss Julian Thompson, studio manager Russell Carr, designers Matt Hill, Steve Crijns, Jon Statham and Geoff Fenney plus senior engineer "Doughnut" Dave Minter - had found a donor Elise and drawn up a timetable to shrink fit several dozen essential steps into the three and a bit months available.

They had also done a lot of preliminary thinking about the new car's shape and function. And they had put together an exhibition of early sketches and influences clooected in three groups: Heritage (lots of reference to past road-going Lotus models), Formula (heavy motor racing influence), and Techno (cars whose new materials and architectural style was their biggest feature).

Some wit at Lotus had codenamed the new car Enid. In the second week of June we headed to Lotus's HQ at Hethel in Norfolk to discuss her vital statistics.

When you're already building a car as successful as the Lotus Elise, the last thing you want to produce is a home-grown alternative. That doubles your development costs but doesn’t boost sales. What we need is a car of a different funciton, character and price, ehich can still use the basic Elise package, suitably modified.

Other car makers d othis all the time: a Ford Ka is surprisingly closely related to a Puma and Fiesta; a Fiat Barchetta has plenty of Punto underneath; and if you cut a Saab 900, it bleeds Vauxhall Vectra. But these are all clear, confident, easily distinguished products. How can we give Enid an image that is honest about her close relationship with Elise, yet which gives her a distinctive function and justifies a higher price ? Suddenly our lack of marketing skills was staring us right in the face.

The solution came, as most solutions do, through discussion. Clearly anything we do is going to have to fit around the supremely well positioned standard Elise. which fits perfectly between the being too spartan for genuine day-to-day motoring and too ritzy to be a proper Lotus. There is no way Enid is going to be a luxurious Elise. Glitz is inconsistent with the Lotus image, we decided. It was a bad day when the Esprits started being tinselled up in white leather for the US market a few years ago, and the good times only rolled again when the Sport 300 brought back race bucket seats and body colour surfaces in the cockpit.

Neither is Enid going to be a cheaper Elise, our group decided. We did talk around that idea for a few minutes; after all, people are regularly seduced by the idea of building "the modern Lotus 7". But given that the standard Elise is hardly a gin palace, and that nobody complains about its eminently sensible price, it hardly semms good marketing to propose a car to undercut it. "I can hear the dealers moaning from here," as somebody said.

Clearly we must add value - propose a lower volume, more expensive car whose extra image and capability provide the same good value for money as the existing Elise. The primary question, we realised, was: what will Elise owners pay extra for ?

Once we had that, the answers came easily. Elise owners will pay more for extra performance. more roadholding, more driver appeal, a tougher (and better sounding) engine, a better gearchange - plus a new shape which embodies all of our car's tougher image and higher performance.

By the end of our first meeting we'd decided on our car's main characteristics. Here are the highlights:

A 500kg dry weight. Since the Elise has reaped such benefit from its lightness, we want an even greater benefit for the Enid. Minter reckoned taking another 200kg out of the car will be tough, but our decision to ditch doors, side windows, heater/ventilation systems, cut down the windscreen to the legal minimum and expose parts of the chassis will help a lot.
More power. Our car needs decisively more power than the 188bhp of the standard 1.8 litre Rover K-series, but the much discussed 190bhp version probably won't be homologated. We decided on a forthcoming 170bhp version recommended by Minter.
A better gearbox. The standard box's long lever and Rover saloon fell are rather too obvious we felt. The 340R needs a better looking gearchange with a much shorter lever and throw, mounted race style on the driver's right, on the chassis sill. We decided to throw in a new close ratio set for the gearbox and possibly also to give it straight cut gears for an even crisper response.
A distinctive name.The main issue here is whether or not to refer to Elise in the new car's title. The consensus was that it would be more honest to do so, although some wanted to call the car Extreme. The best suggestion came from Sutcliffe, who suggested 340 for the car's optimal power-to-weight ration of 340bhp per ton. To that we added R, recalling a lightweight version of the original Lotus Elan, called 26R. At this stage anyway, we have a car callled Lotus Elise 340R.
An even better chassis. Minter made it clear e'll need to sacrifice some of the Elises's compliant ride to improve the handling, but we reckon the 340R's future as a track-day car warrants this. To improve grip we are opting for wider, bigger diameter soft compound tyres, probably Yokohamas. Proposed sizes were 195/50 15s in front and 225/45 16s at the rear, but Minter agreed to do more research to discover whether even more radical combinations can be found.
Lots of technical detail. Exhausts should be exposed and preferably use carbon fibre cans, motorcycle style. Wheels and brakes should be of exotic design to stress lightweight and race derivation. Other strategic bits- gearchange, instruments, fuel filler, engine intakes - need an overtly "designed" look to stress the car's value.
An on-road price of £33,000, with nothing else to pay. Every 340R will be available with a Track Pack at around £3,000, but there would be no other options. No hi-fi, no air conditioning, no chintzy seats and emphatically no King's Road colours. Just a perfectly focused, high-performance car with a power to weight ration to match a Porsche Turbo's.

Having decied all this, the job was to get serious about the Enid's shape, which will embody the car's image and sell it to customers. Firstly, we scanned the designers' Heritage-Formula-Techno board, everyone choosing their favourite details and overall designs, and marking them with little yellow tabs.

That's how Lotus Design conducts things when producing proposals for a customer, and it's amazing how well it works. Though a dozen disparate individuals were involved in this, all with different axes to grind, it was surprising how opinion grouped around the proportions of one of the Formula designs and around the details of some of the Heritage and Techno cars. Having gathered our views, Thompson and Co sent us away for a week while designers produced sharper proposals.

When we returned we were confronted by five different Elise 340R proposals, all reproduced here. Each was expressed from several different angles and in considerable detail, and each designer made a small presentation, explaining the principal points of his design. (it is apparent that in the car design business it is not enough to be able to have great ideas; you also have to be able to explain them every bit as well as you conceive them.) Again we were asked to choose and comment, both on the overall designs and on details.

Opinion grouped around designs B and C, by Carr and Crijns respectively. There was much to like in the other three themes: Statham's Lotus heritage references in theme A, Hill's technical detail in theme C and Fenney's abbreviated, high tailed body in theme E. But eventually we agreed on Carr's design as the car that would be developed into three dimensions, and between our second meeting and this magazine's publication, he has modified the car to take account of comments and criticisms made at the time.

As the Elise 340R saga proceeds, we'll all be sharpening our thoughts about the car's shape, and explaining in later episodes how on-paper concepts proceed to scale drawings and then to a full size model. There is an enourmous amount of work to be done. But if the car that pops up in Birmingham looking as well as it has been conceived and specified, then we believe it will more than justify your going along to the NEC in the third week of October to see it.

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