Revolutionary FeatherWeight

The project was born from the commitment and the tenacity of its founder, Colin Chapman, who since managed to free himself from the commitments with the British Aluminium Company, was finally able to devote his work full time to the research and development, both for racing cars, like Formula 2, both to road cars. The coupe was stable even at high speed and not even suffering for the side wind. The study of the lines was done using the principles of the planes, but then, some bending, caused inconvenience in terms of practicality, such as the side windows that, given their convex shape, could not be lowered, but only removed. Initially stowed in the boot and in a second time in derived compartments in the interior of the doors. Reinforcements were present only where they were needed, so it turned out a total weight of only 643 kg. The engine was very light too, but unfortunately some parts, externally produced, didn’t held up the stresses to which the vehicle was subjected, and certainly the extreme lightness could also result in other small resistance troubles. Obviously low, light and sleek, the Elite enabled remarkable performance: 185 kph top speed that, with a small tuning easily became 205 kph. Certainly the noise level was very high, also because of the choices made (but does someone really mind about too much noise?). The real problem, in fact, was the commercial one, in fact the price was not cheap, so Lotus tried in every way to overcome this inconvenient, even thinking of selling the car in kit form, to benefit from tax breaks, but the downside was to outsource to inexperienced mechanics so that they could ruin the reputation of the Company itself. In any case, this little coupe was one of the many examples of the winning philosophy of a pioneer, founder of the “less is more” philosophy.