There are few, if any, road car platforms that have been developed for as wide a variety of racing machinery as the aluminium chassis produced for the 1996 Lotus Elise, production of which has just ceased (on 22 December) at Lotus’s Hethel, Norfolk plant after 26 years with 51,738 examples of the Elise and derivatives including the Europa, Exige and the related but differently chassied Evora produced.
The little Elise holds a special part in the history of DSC, no fewer than three of our regular writers own roadgoing Elises and a fourth, who shall remain nameless, put an early US import into a ditch! (and no, it wasn’t the Editor!).
Beyond all of that, though the range of uses that the chassis has been put to in motorsport may only be rivalled by the Porsche 911, a car with decades more opportunities for that to have happened, and the little Lotus beats even that high bar in extremis (see below!)
Through that long production run the platform has seen use in:
GT1 racing (Lotus and the derivative Bitter);
GTE (the Evora GTE) that raced in the ILMC, finished Le Mans, raced in the ALMS with Alex Job Racing and in GT Cup in the UK.
GT3, (supercharged Exige).
GT4 (versions of the Evora, Exige and 2-Eleven).
Cup’ and one-make (Vauxhall VX220, Exige and Elise) plus innumerable club racers around the world.
And there is the ‘Mother Chassis’ GT300 in Super GT (and in the 2019 Suzuka 10 Hours), not based around the original Lotus Chassis but retaining the unmistakable Evora styling!
There have been speed records set by the Hennessy Venom GT, a US-built Hypercar built around the Elise chassis (pic below by Axion23).
And, with zero motorsport relevance, it is also the fastest ever road-going car and subsequently the only sportscar in space, courtesy of the Space-X programme which launched a (Lotus-chassised) Tesla Roadster into heliocentric orbit in 2018!
Happily, the motorsport connection looks set to continue with the successor Emira due to spawn an RML-developed GT4 derivative.
Thanks Lotus, the Elise and friends may not have seen the huge success on track that its fans would have hoped for but by god we’ve had a lot of fun along the way!
