Car manufacturers are never ones to let anniversaries go unnoticed, but some are worthier of celebration than others. Like the one that falls today for the Lotus Elise S1; 25 years ago, on September 12th, 1995, the pioneering sports car and its extruded bonded aluminium chassis were revealed at the Frankfurt motor show. The new car wouldn’t just change the course of Lotus’s history, it became a reference point for building light, strong sports cars for decades in the future. No less significantly, it gave us enthusiasts an involving, usable, beautiful Lotus roadster, one that’s now been with us for a quarter of a century.
Plenty of PHers will have experienced the fruits of the Elise story first-hand, but many will not know of how the car’s launch was far from simple. In fact, its name and reveal location were changed at the last minute – as is now being retold by Lotus’s then head of communications, Patrick Peal, as part of the birthday celebrations. Romano Artioli didn’t like the 111 name - intended to be said as one-eleven - even though it worked in terms of sequence: it followed Lotus’s Type 110 bike, the production version of Chris Boardman’s Type 108 Olympic steed, and Type 112 was going to be the F1 car. So he unilaterally - and now infamously - changed the name to Elise, after his granddaughter Elisa.
“In hindsight, Mr Artioli was right,” said Peal. “Elise was the perfect name for the car, shared with a playful little girl – his granddaughter Elisa – who helped launch the car to the world.” It seems the whole team agreed, even though the late switch meant that the Elise logo and promotional material had to be rushed through to completion. The deadline was then made a month shorter because Artioli decided to launch the car in Frankfurt, rather than the originally planned London Motorfair. His reasoning was simple: the German event was the bigger stage, drawing in a larger crowd. The Elise was certainly deserving of attention.
Peal said the Lotus team had to speed up the press photography process by using a studio in Norwich, where the metallic racing green and tan interior Frankfurt car would be set against a bright mustard yellow background. Peal explained that Lotus “needed a background to offset the racing green of the car”, so bright mustard yellow was chosen as it “brought out the shape, lines and particularly the colour of the car perfectly”. It was also a reference to the Lotus logo colours, helpfully, its sixties F1 racing liveries and, of course, “the spice famously grown in Norfolk”. No prizes for guessing that one.
Of course, the Elise’s party piece was always the innovative epoxy-bonded extruded aluminium chassis at its core, which helped ensure that the complete car weighed little more than 700kg. It was light back then and it’s skeletal in 2020; you could place two Elises on one side of the scale and balance them both against a modern hatchback. Lightness was obviously also ensured by the Elise’s simplicity; there’s little more than the 120hp four-pot, five-speed gearbox and Lotus’s all-round double wishbone suspension bolted to the structure under fibreglass panels. There was a little more to it than that, but not much.
There was so much to brag about that you can understand Lotus’s decision to unveil the car’s rolling chassis before the finished product. The aluminium structure was displayed before the covers came off the Elise because, as Peal remembers, the team “wanted the world to fall in love with the Elise’s technology and the engineering as well as with the actual car”. Plus, he admits, “the whole structure would become a talking point and an advertisement for Lotus Engineering”. Cars bearing the ‘tuned by Lotus’ badge have carried with them even more significant appeal since then.
“I even kept a throttle pedal in my jacket pocket which I would produce during conversations to show what extruded aluminium technology was all about,” Peal continues. “It was so light and neat – it weighed no more than a small wallet and summed up the car and its innovation perfectly!” He likens the Elise’s innovations to those of Colin Chapman’s earlier Grand Prix cars; the difference being at that Frankfurt show that “instead of F1 teams it was the other car companies who were stunned by what we had come up with”.
The rest, of course, is history, with the Elise’s technical genius equating to exactly the sort of absorbing on-road characteristics hoped for from a new small Lotus. It remains a PH Hero in the truest sense possible. It was to become a car for a new era of Lotus, too, something that means there’s an air of familiarity with the brand’s current, Evija-headed scenario. Although back in the nineties, Lotus still felt like a plucky British sports car maker punching well above its weight. Now, with Geely providing the financial support, the scale of the operation is a little bit larger. But not so much that one special anniversary can’t be marked fondly. Happy birthday, Elise!
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