IT’S THE ECONOMY OF EFFORT THAT GETS YOU, every time. The way the car treads so lightly down the road, tiny amounts of throttle boosting you forward, the steering wheel light in your hands, its rim mildly distracted by bumps and camber changes but those same bumps absorbed by the supple chassis. The compelling sense of doing more with less can be attributed largely to the Elise’s lack of mass, but it’s also about scale: it’s a small car, a narrow car, which means that whatever road it’s on, it has more road to play with.
Getting back into a Series 1 Elise is always a joy. It was a remarkable car when it was new back in 1996, genuinely innovative with its extruded and bonded aluminium chassis, to which Lotus added lightness by using Rover’s new all-aluminium K-series engine and even fitting MMC (metal matrix composite) aluminium disc brakes. The result was a mid-engined sports car with a circa-700kg kerb weight, a good figure then and an astonishing one today.
The S1 Elise is a reminder that if you make a car light, you don’t need a huge amount of grip or horsepower to have fun. However, as this one demonstrates, if you have quite a bit more ofis a comprehensively restored Series 1 with a 210bhp K-series, wide-track suspension and Yokohama Advan Neova tyres.
