I’ve always had a thing for the Lotus Esprit.  Most people know it as the car James Bond turned into a submarine, far less as the car Sharon Stone drove in Basic Instinct.  The truth is Lotus only made a few hundred cars per year, and most of those were sold in Europe. I love cars with hard geometric angles and the early Esprits are the purest examples ever made.  Their production ran from 1976 to 2004, with many changes along the way, but what I consider three body styles.  The iconic version from roughly 76-92, the “S4” which rounded off the edges for a more “modern” look, and the V8 version which while looking similar was really a different kind of car.

There are a few Esprits in the Seattle area.  I saw two on display at the Pacific Northwest Historics race held each 4th of July weekend.  At that show I was browsing a used book vendor and found two Esprit-specific books.  One was just a collection of magazine articles, the other was more like a book and then I recognized the author, Jeremy Walton.  He wrote a column for my BMW car club, addressing what was happening in Britain for at least a decade. The choice was obvious.  While subtitled “The Complete Story”, it covers the two Liter 4-cylinder S1-S4 and turbo variants, but was published before they rolled out a V8 version, and a dozen years before end of production.  But it does completely cover my favorite version of the car.

The people at Lotus (who were also racing in Formula 1) were very big on keeping the car lightweight.  The original S1 Esprit at a 2 Liter inline 4 but only weighed 1,984 lbs.  That is 600 pounds lighter than my ’91 BMW 318is with a similar engine.  That makes a huge difference in performance.  While the car handled well out of the box the original’s acceleration was just “respectable” instead of impressive”.  In the final turbo-charged version of that engine, the car could go 0-60 in 4.6 seconds, which will turn heads even today.  [After the book was published, they introduced a V8 which was only slightly faster, and by that time the car had bloated to 2,950 lbs.  Also they had to significantly de-tune the engine to avoid shredding the transmission.  Lotus could not afford to make its own transmission, so it was limited by what it could purchase from other manufacturers].

The book talks a lot about the people behind the various programs.  Collin Chapman, who basically was Lotus, was a fanatic on speed through lightness.  Giorgio Giugiaro who had designed the look of the Ferrari 250 GT, and Maserati Merak, and did the original Esprit.  Tony Rudd and others helping drive the project.  Walton’s book is fully of details about each revision and details they changed.  Its a must-have if you love the first fifteen years of the Esprit.