Lotus Elise -Road Test: Sports Car Int.

[mason]

Sports Car International
September 2004
by Dan Carney
pages: 42-48

BACK TO BASICS – After having sampled a pre-production version in England for our March issue, we finally get to drive a production version of the hardcore, track ready, sub-200 pound Lotus Elise on American soil, er, asphalt.



"I only had one problem with the car yesterday," quipped race driver Doc Bundy. "My face was hurting from grinning so much." A jaded veteran racer tasked with giving dealers taxi rides around a track in the new street car they will be selling sounds like a recipe for teenager-grade sulking and self-pity, but Bundy was exuberant after spending a day terrifying the company's 39 U.S. dealers in the new Lotus Elise. Now we know why.

With the Elise, Lotus has returned to the U.S. and returned to its roots as a builder of minimalist, elemental sports cars that emphasize performance through light weight. Sure, the company has technically been here all along, selling a handful of its Mesozoic-era Esprits each year. But with plans to sell 2,400 Elises a year, the company rises clear of the kit car ranks.



"The Elise is confirmation that Colin Chapman's vision of building innovative, lightweight, top-performing cars that make drivers smile is very much alive," said Arnie Johnson, former CEO of Lotus Cars USA. Only words, sure, but after years of the porky Esprit, the right words at least.

The rest of the world knew that Lotus hadn't lost faith in Chapman's religion of low mass in favor of high horsepower, because the Elise has been available else-where since 1996. Lotus has sold more than 17,000 Elises during this time, making it the company's best-selling model ever.

In order to clear U.S. emission requirements and provide the inevitably heavier Federalized Elise with enough oomph, Lotus turned to Toyota for engines. The 2ZZ-GE 1.8-liter 4-cylinder from the Celica GTS was chosen since it was already EPA certified and produces 180 horsepower— significantly more than the 120 hp in the base, Rover-powered Elise for the overseas market. Plus Lotus engineers were able to coax an additional ten horsepower out of the DOHC 16-valve engine by tweaking the engine management system. Toyota's C64 6-speed manual transaxle from the Celica was also part of the deal.

The same engine in the 2,500-pound Celica GTS feels utterly gutless below 6,200 rpm—it makes a scant 130 lb-ft of torque way up at 6,800 rpm—and even its top-end power is unimpressive. With just 1,975 pounds to haul around and the Lotus-massaged ECU—torque is up slightly to 138lIb-ft, produced at the same rpm—the Toyota powerplant seems transformed. Even the motor's personality has changed, from a thrashy engine that complains that you're killing it when revved to one that tolerates, or maybe even encourages such treatment



Hardcore Sports Car
The Toyota-powered Elise is a car that is a legitimate challenger to established small sports cars and even, in some ways, to supercars. The Elise is quick, stylish, fun and—at $40,000—within reach for many buyers, so it will surely lure customers from the Porsche Boxster, BMW Z4 and Honda S2000. Its phenomenal handling prowess, exclusivity and the Lotus pedigree may even snare the occasional exotic car shopper, especially Anglophiles who fondly recall Colin Chapman tossing his cap in the air at the finish line when his cars won races.

Some of those shoppers, however, may find that memory lane is not as wide or smoothly paved as they recall. When Lotus says that the Elise is true to Chapman's philosophy, it means it. This is no Mercedes SLK boulevard cruiser posing as a sports car. The Elise is a borderline race car that is legal for street use, and carries all of the good and bad characteristics that implies.

If it is your dream to drive one of the Le Mans-dominating Audis or Bentleys as a weekend plaything, then you've found your car. When the single, central wiper sweeps the broad windshield, the view over the hood echoes the in-car camera shots seen during rainy endurance races. The Elise is the closest thing to a sports racer available in the U.S. The English-built open-cockpit Radical SR3 sports racer is legal for British highways, but not for American ones; that car is truly a street-going racer. The Elise approaches things from the opposite direction: It is a track-worthy street car.



Styling is clearly race-inspired, but not by the recent Le Mans competitors. The slight pontoons of the front fenders recall the classic racers of the '60s, on a two-thirds scale. One can imagine racing to leap into the Elise's cockpit at the start of the 24-hour classic at La Sarthe. The Elise's stubby wedge shape looks vaguely on-point from some angles, but not tall. The effect, if not the exact styling, is reminiscent of the Lancia Stratos.

The hand-sprayed paint is available in 14 different shades. In addition to a few basic colors, there are some bright metallics available for extra money, and even a few "lifestyle" colors (think toxic waste green) for still more. Despite the advent of modern, automated paint shops, the quality of this manually shot paint looks excellent.

According to Lotus, one reason for the manual painting is that the lightweight plastic (Lotus calls it "composite") bodywork won't tolerate the high temperatures in the baking ovens used by automated paint shops. While the composite bodywork is light, and we'll forgive damn near anything for a car that weighs less than 2,000 pounds, it does suffer from an irregular surface that is visibly wavy from ten paces.



Corvette and Viper engineers have worked hard to smooth this notorious short-coming in their cars, with commendable, if incomplete, success. Mercedes employed innovative and costly techniques to ensure that the carbon-fiber flanks of its $400,000 SLR are smooth as steel. That wasn't practical for Lotus, and the result is a car that still looks like it is made of plastic.

There's no steel under this skin. The Elise is built on an extruded aluminum space frame that boasts an impressively high rigidity figure of 9,500 Nm per degree of deflection. Take that, German sports car snobs! Your Boxster and Z4 aren't nearly as stiff; the Z3 was a dishrag by comparison. Aston Martin not only uses the same technique to build the new DB9, Lotus actually makes the components used in the Aston. The bare Elise frame weighs an ethereal 150 pounds and is beautiful to behold.

The Elise has a bare-bones interior with plenty of its beautiful aluminum structure visible to the driver. There is a bit of leather here and a dash of carpet there to dress it up, especially on the cars equipped with the Touring Pack ($1,350), which includes full leather seats, additional carpeting and extra sound insulation. But it is little more than the proverbial lipstick on the pig. The Elise is not a luxury car; it's not even a comfortable car, because that isn't its purpose.

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[mason]

The Elise's cockpit is cramped. The low seats and flat metal floor with a narrow spine down the center recall the Porsche 914, especially those that have been stripped down for track duty. The narrow footwell suggests a formula car, with pedals spaced so closely that the Elise should come with a complimentary pair of driving shoes. Any shoe bulkier than a Converse All-Star sneaker on any double-digit size male foot makes it difficult to operate the pedals individually rather than two at a time. The driver's seat has a fixed, non-reclining back; look elsewhere for a power-adjustable La-Z-Boy. And you're going to need to like the person in the other seat, because you will be rubbing elbows. And shoulders. It isn't quite as snug or intimate as the Minardi two-seat tandem Fl car, but you'll be quite friendly with your co-pilot in the Elise.

The U.S.-spec Elise is a no-compromises driver's car, even though it comes standard with air conditioning, stereo and other comfort features that even die-hard sports car nuts can't live without anymore. (The Blaupunkt stereo reproduces recorded music, I'm told, but it hardly seems the point of such a car to dwell on it.) But in the best British tradition, the soft top unlatches over each door jamb and rolls up like a tool kit— no power folding hard top here. A warning label instructs that the roof is designed to repel rain showers, but that in heavy rain "some water may enter the cockpit."



Real purists will also appreciate the roll-up windows, especially since the car is narrow enough that the driver can crank up the passenger's-side window. Power windows are included in the Touring Pack. The traditional analog gauges also look the part, though a yellow LED shift light provides a slight modern update.

Street or Track?
The Elise is a thrilling street car that brings a grin to the driver's face, but it would be a real challenge to live with as a daily driver for most people. Some of us are sufficiently dedicated to drive the Elise to work every day, but most of us will prefer to save the car for nights and weekends.

The unassisted steering is light and direct, with excellent—dare we say race car-like—steering feel and feedback, without being harsh or prone to kickback over bumps. In our exercises on a very tight autocross course, we found that quicker ratio power steering would have been better, but on the street and Barber Motorsports Park's road course the manual steering was perfect. The firm steering response is more reminiscent of an old MGB than a modern Toyota MR2 or S2000, with their lightning-quick power-boosted steering units.



The engine note that thrills the sports car nut, especially when Toyota's variable valve timing switches to the hotter cam profile at 6,200 rpm, will quickly tire the less dedicated. People who never lived with an MG or Triumph with a glass-pack muffler will probably complain about the noise. Those of us who did probably can't hear well enough anymore to notice.

Unlike the direct, positive steering, the shifter, as is typical among mid-engine cars, is only good rather than great. Shift action is smooth and accurate—on par with the likes of the 6-speed Boxster and MR2, but clearly inferior to the front-engined Miata, Z4 and S2000. The shifter is probably the only component that doesn't irresistibly induce the grin about which Bundy warned us. It does its job competently, but doesn't encourage gear changes just for the fun of flicking the lever; it is a stick, but not a joystick. However, the ratios are well chosen, letting the driver keep the engine on the cam when banging off redline shifts.



The Elise's highway ride, like everything else about this dual-purpose car, is a compromise. That means it slams over potholes, with little padding in the thin seat bottoms to cushion the blow. Think Porsche 911 with track suspension rather than a stock Miata. Cruising a twisty bit of back road with the roof off and windows down on a warm day, the Elise is the perfect way to forget the day's irritations, letting the driver simply enjoy the car's effortless response to input and the sound of the engine. The Elise's driver embraces the imperfections of the tarmac as part of the experience, rather than seeking to be insulated from them, as in, say, a Lexus ES330, so while enjoying the flow of the road during a spirited drive, bumps go unnoticed. Hit the same bumps while stuck behind a logging track for mile after mile, and their jolt will only add insult to injury, making the ride seem worse than it really is.

With the Sport Pack ($2,480) the ride is not noticeably degraded, because while the springs are slightly stiffer and the ride is slightly lower (5 mm), these are only tweaks to the base setting, not wholesale changes. The Sport Pack's Bilstein shocks include adjustable perches for the Eibach springs, so the Elise's ride height and corner weights can be adjusted for track use.



This setup also includes lighter forged alloy wheels wrapped in stickier tires. The front wheels are an inch wider than the base wheels—6.5 x 16-inch vs. 5.5 x 16-inch— while the rears are the same at 7.5 x 17. Altogether, the forged wheels drop 14.2 pounds of unsprung weight from the car. Instead of Yokohama Neova AD07 LTS tires (175/55ZR16, 225/45ZR17), the Sport Pack's wheels are shod with autocross-ready Yokohama A048 rubber (195/50ZR16, 225/45ZR17).

The Sport suspension's primary advantage lies in its adjustability to suit conditions, more than in its stiffening and lowering. The Sport-equipped model is quicker and more precise, but a touch twitchy in comparison when driven hard. At nine-tenths, we found the base model to be a bit more stable and confidence-inspiring; it started sliding at lower limits, but did so comfortably and predictably. Either way, the car is extremely tolerant of mid-corner corrections to the plotted course, letting the driver off the hook for sins that would require heavy penance in many other cars. The difference in lap times between the base and the Sport suspension is slight when driven at the limit, according to Bundy.

That's less an indictment of the Sport suspension than a tribute to the base setup. With either suspension, the car exhibits mild understeer at turn-in, which is easily offset by turning in while braking. The car's power-assisted anti-lock brakes permit some lockup, so the car slithers and slides slightly under maximum braking, letting the driver pitch the tail out on the entry to slow corners. The car's light weight makes the brakes' job easy, and they return the favor with strong, predictable, fade-free response without the use of grabby brake pad materials that can be a nuisance around town.

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[mason]

Mid-corner understeer can be corrected with a brief lift of the throttle which helps point the nose toward the intended apex. The Elise, like any mid-engined car, rotates around a point right behind the driver. Despite the Elise's low polar moment of inertia, it's easy to catch slides. But it's also easy to start slides, which could cause frequent, expensive visits to the tire store.

Approaching Barber Motorsport Park's slow Turn 5 hairpin after a medium-length straight, you crest a slight rise that blocks the view of the left-hander and its braking zone. You brake hard through the brake markers, relying on the Elise's excellent binders, and turn in under braking to rotate the tail out and point the nose at the apex. Hit it right, and the Elise will hold its line at full throttle over the first apex for 5A, through the second apex for 5B and on through the exit. Botch the turn-in and you'll need a small lift to re-aim the front.

Body motions are well controlled by the suspension, with the car holding its line over mid-corner disturbances with no terrifying stepping out of the rear end, even under acceleration. The Elise responds exactly as expected, with direct feedback through the steering wheel and the seat of the pants. The wider front wheels and tires of the Sport Pack neutralize most of the mild understeer found in the base car.

Confrontation Ensuing
Lotus predicts that 85 percent of Elises will be equipped with the Touring Pack, and 40 percent will have the Sport Pack; the two packages can be combined. With a base price of $39,985, that means that most Elises will sell for closer to $45,000. But that transaction price is still within ten percent of the base price, unlike some "entry-level" German sports cars we can think of that sell for nearly 60 grand these days.

So while the Elise makes even the Miata and the MR2 seem lavish and spacious by comparison, its performance dusts both of those cars—though the Mazdaspeed Miata narrows the performance gap somewhat. With 50 more horsepower but saddled with an extra 860 pounds, the S2000 is probably closest to the Elise in terms of performance. A comparison test between the Elise, the S2000 and the other roadsters would be a very interesting proposition. [Look for it in the November issue.—Ed.]



Like the sheriff in a movie coming out of retirement to chase off the bad guys, Lotus has returned to the American sports car market to take on the best sports cars from Germany and Japan. If the Elise doesn't end up being the quickest gun in the West, it will certainly be the lightest, which would've made Colin Chapman proud.