Lotus has unveiled the new Theory 1, a radical three-seat concept car inspired by the Esprit.
In celebration of the original, we’ve been digging through the Autocar Archive to find one of its high points: when Lotus took on Europe’s giants in the GT2 class and shocked the lot of them.
Back in August 1995, just before that year’s Four Hours of Silverstone, we had the chance to thrash the Autocar-sponsored Esprit GT2 around Lotus’s test track at Hethel.
We went in with the aim of establishing the difference in performance between a road car and a racing thoroughbred, but it left a deeper impression than we might have expected.
Here’s an extract from that story, which you can read in full in the Autocar Archive, where you can search and read through 129 years of the weekly magazine at the click of a button.
23 August 1995: Esprit de War
I was told I would stall four times and not to feel too bad about it. Apparently, everybody stalls the Lotus Esprit GT2 four times when they first drive it.
Well, not me. I stalled it five times and my eventual getaway was only marginally less graceful than a newborn giraffe learning to walk. No matter, I was on a track in the Esprit GT2, the car that, in the only round of the BPR sportscar championship it contested, proved much faster than every other GT2 sportscar. So much so that, when it retired just eight minutes from the flag, it was well over a lap ahead of any other car in its class.
I slowly familiarised myself with the uniquely focussed surroundings of a racing car. Meanwhile, I recalled the last few laps of Lotus’s test track I had completed in this car’s road-going equivalent, the Esprit S4S. That car is so special that, no matter how many times you climb aboard, it is always a bit better than you remembered. The noise of a Ferrari F512M, the gearchange of a Mazda MX-5, the agility of a Caterham 7 are all impossible to overhype in your own mind – and so it is with the chassis of an S4S.
Around the track – a boomerang-shaped affair with two hairpins connected by terrifically fast straights and curves – the S4S felt better than ever. Softly suspended by supercar standards but controlled to the last degree, the Esprit made light work of this unforgiving circuit. It resisted understeer like few mid-engined cars I know, yet remained stable even through the monstrous windsock corner, a sweeping fourth gear bend with an apex as late as it is blind. Its balance was as impressive as its poise, its on-limit forgiveness more memorable even than the legendary Esprit grip.