21st CENTURY TOY

Latest to get the restomod treatment is the S1 Elise. With a potent 210bhp and a rejuvenated chassis, Analogue Automotive's take promises to bring a modern classic bang up to date. We drive it

- JOHN BARKER

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-aluminum 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 of both you can have even more fun without losing that essential Elise appeal. It's built by Analogue Automotive and is a comprehensively restored Series 1 with a 210bhp K-series, wide-track suspension and Yokohama Advan Neova tyres.

Analogue is run by Steffen Dobke, who has owned Elises for over 20 years and been working on them for almost as long. 'As soon as I drove an S1 I was hooked,' he recalls. 'I bought my first one in 2000, tracked it, crashed it, put it back together.

In 2012/13 I opened a little unit here, on the outskirts of Petersfield [in Hampshire], and gradually expanded.