A SENSIBLE SUPERCAR

The cleverly conceived four-seater Elite secured Lotus a place at the big players' table, but has it been unfairly maligned since then?

- MARTIN BUCKLEY

The Lotus Elite of 1974 was a clever car - and a brave one for a small company. This bold, wedge-shaped coupé the Norfolk firm's first full four-seater, really was all new, sharing almost nothing with its predecessors and using close to 70% in-house Lotus content.

As uncompromising in its looks as it was in its technology, the Elite maintained all of founder Colin Chapman's traditions of engineering elegance and fine handling in a machine that projected Lotus firmly into the luxury gran turismo class.

It finished the job of putting the company's kit-assembly root in the past with a vehicle that appealed not just to enthusiast buyers, but also to wealthy individuals who wanted a fast, luxurious and practical coupé: traditional Lotus customers who had growing families, plus owners who might be coming fresh to the brand from a Jaguar, BMW or Mercedes-Benz.

People such as Chapman himself, in facts by then in his mid-40s, the Hethel boss had availed himself of a variety of contemporary GT cars to get a feel for what was required.

Superb handling was non-negotiable and achieved via the combination of a low centre of gravity, wide 205/60 tyres and ideal weight distribution. Weight, as ever, was the enemy: at just 2450lb the Elite, with its easily tooled backbone chassis, was much lighter than most of its four-seater rivals of the mid-'70s.

Indeed, there was nothing else quite like it, although Chapman may have been galvanised by the surprise arrival in 1970 of the Marcos Mantis, a failed attempt to do a glassfibre bodied full four-seater of surprisingly similaş concept to that of the Elite.