ELECTRIFY, THEN ADD GREATNESS
THIS FEELS LIKE being in a moving painting. Arms stretched out ahead, hands grasping a tiny steering wheel alive with vibration and information. Capri-blue sky with speed-line clouds overhead. Red-white kerbs flickering under fat slicks. The throttle pedal is heavy, long, a kind of mechanical test of willpower. Override friction and instinct and push it to the stop: those speed lines intensify to a strobing blur; hands seem to move away as the acceleration heaves my body backwards, a dead weight harnessed into an aluminium missile. How can a 50-year-old car be this fast?
The Cosworth DFV just behind my shoulder blades is singing, singing, singing up a never-ending scale, revs soaring for the sky – and we’re still only two thirds of the way to its redline. Tilt head to check the tiny, round mirrors. Evija. Evija? Yep: because the only thing more surreal than the chance to cut loose in the greatest F1 car ever made, in JPS black and gold, is the chance to do it in company with the new Lotus hypercar that’d kill for a legacy as glorious as the Lotus 72, chassis number 5.
The two black cars on these pages are separated by 50 years and very different missions: the Evija hypercar is here to spearhead Lotus’s electric future; the Type 72 F1 car spearheaded Team Lotus to Grand Prix glory time and again through the first half of the ’70s.
