#4 - The British Ballerina

Lotus Elise: Ah, the Elise… The name sounds particularly feminine, but you’d be an idiot if you thought this was a girl-car like the Mazda Miata. This is the perfect badass little sports car for the discerning bloke, make no mistake. It’s a radically styled, aggressively priced roadster that you can take to a Track Day event and send pompous Aston Martin drivers scurrying for cover. This little baby, unlike the big dumb muscle cars from the other side of the Atlantic, wants nothing to do with gas-guzzling engine-pigs because Lotus aims at obtaining high performance through building light-weight cars which can be fairly brisk even if they’re powered by souped up lawnmower engines. The newest Elise “111R”, for instance, is powered by a clever 1.8 Liter engine good for 190 hp. Seems rather anemic, I know, but since the car weighs only about 800 kilos, that’s not at all bad. That’s mainly because Lotus employs some of the world’s finest suspension and chassis engineers who have gone to great lengths to make sure that even a spoilt-brat supercar chauvinist would agree that the Elise is a symphony of delicate balance and handling genius.

Power Lap [+1 min 36 sec]: I can already see jaws hanging open at the Elise’s Power Lap figures. Only 5 seconds slower than the M3 GTR despite having an unbelievable 250 horses less?? I hope the Elise has earned your respect by now. You only need to drive it for a few seconds through a twisting piece of track to realize how truly special this car is. This car feels so incredibly nimble and light that you’d think it was built entirely out of rubber bands and aluminum springs. NO other cars in this game, not even the cars above the Elise in this list feel so graceful through corners, it feels as if you’re dancing with the World Figure Skating Champion and she’s lovingly whispering in your ear to tell you what the next move is going to be. I have absolutely no clue what the Lotus Engineers have done with the Chassis and the Suspension to make them so communicative. Back in the ballroom, you know how you tenderly caress your dance partner’s body with your fingertips? That’s what driving the Elise is like. You can prepare a highly accurate 3-D map of the road labeling every little change in the surface after driving this car, that’s how much feedback you get from the Chassis-Suspension combo. It is just utterly magical. I simply cannot make you realize how lovely this car is around bends.

Then comes the engine. It’s a 1.8 Liter unit with Double Overhead Camshafts built by Toyota of all people but is pretty revolutionary because the two camshafts work in shifts, so to speak. One is devoted to playing the conscientious adult who drives “responsibly” to the grocery store to pick up Breakfast cereal for the kids and the other one, well, let’s just say it kicks in above 6000 rpm. And when it does, the engine simply mutates into a loud, bad-tempered, and foul-mouthed barbarian. The noise you get past 6000 rpm under full-bore acceleration is just fantastic, it sounds like Gene Hackman and Yosemite Sam swearing at each other while brandishing chainsaws. It sounds refreshing in a thoroughly unrestrained way.

But sadly, I’m afraid I have to stop the eulogizing right there. The engine, for all its technical and aural brilliance, is hugely underpowered for a chassis that’s so talented. This car can take so much more power, you can hear it pleading you to take it faster and faster through corners. But the problem is, the “responsible adult” camshaft is an extremely annoying control freak and whenever you hit something or you’re going up a steep incline, it refuses to rev up quickly and put Gene Hackman back in control. Unfortunately, this problem is compounded by the fact that the Elise weighs as much as Kate Moss’s Dior nightgown and whenever you hit something head-on, the massive loss of momentum forces you to shift all the way down to 2^nd. Oh god, I can’t bear to elaborate on the Elise’s problems anymore coz it’s just too painful. Suffice to say that I loathe vicious circles...But not to worry, my darling. I still love you!