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See the extended version of this post for the full press release, but in short - Lotus Sport, the division responsible for Lotus’ racing efforts, will be marketing products in the US. The first examples of this are the supercharged (track only) Lotus Sport Exige Cup car, and the (normally aspirated) Lotus Sport Elise. My personal hope is that this will make it easier for Lotus to offer a supercharger upgrade to the power-hungry Elise owners out there (me!). (via EliseTalk)
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As rumored, Lotus unveiled a new version of the Elise for the US market, the Lotus Sport Elise. It’s similar to a standard Elise with the Lotus Sport Suspension (LSS) option, but features better, adjustable shocks, a high performance clutch (interesting!), stainless steel brake lines (not really needed) and a harness bar. MSRP is $54,995, and the car is only available in the color combination shown here - Saffron Yellow with Storm Titanium stripes. (via Car and Driver). (UPDATE - added official press release).
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The new Lotus Sport Elise is due to be announced this Thursday at the New York Auto Show. Our garden gnome spies report that Lotus will build only fifty of this special edition Elise. They’ll all come equipped with the excellent Ohlins shocks, and be painted Saffron Yellow with Storm Titanium stripes. Black wheels and a sportier interior will complete the package. Powertrain changes are very unlikely. Stay tuned for the official announcement in a few days (ok, so the gnomes didn’t tell me, they’re still out at the pub. I learned about this at EliseTalk).

I went on a little shopping spree at Sector111 and picked up a few bits for my Elise. Today’s project was installing the microMirror ($110, Sector111.com), a replacement rearview mirror that, like the Elise, is smaller than just about anything else out there. Actually, I was a little surprised at just how ‘micro’ it was. I mean, I expected it to be small, but this was miniscule (a size comparison, old versus new, can be seen in the rest of this post). Installation was a breeze; I used a paint can opener to deflect the latch and allow the stock mirror to slide down. The only hiccup in the process was that the instructions call for red loctite to be used. I really wonder just how many people have THAT laying around in their garage! However, being an engineer, I had loctite blue and used that instead (it’s for smaller fasteners than the red but will probably work fine in this application). I have not yet driven the Elise with this mirror, as our weather has been pretty lousy lately. A quick test in the garage shows visibility does not appear to be quite as good as I’d like, you can just barely see the edges of both seats at the same time. Beautiful product though, it looks great in the Elise and if the visibility works out OK, it’ll be money well spent. See the rest of this post for some pictures.
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From CAR magazine comes these pictures of what is rumored to be the next Esprit. Is it real? Well, who knows. Rumor has it Lotus will be showing two new cars at the NY auto show this weekend, one Elise variant and one car that’s something else. Perhaps they’ll unveil the next generation Esprit then? You can find a PDF version of the article in the gallery (click on full size document, then download document). (pics and pdf via SELOC).
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The new Lotus F1.50 pickup, sporting a 10kg towing capacity, 5kg capacity pickup bed, and sub three second zero to sixty times is now being produced! Yes, it’s thankfully just an April Fool’s gag from those blokes in Hethel, no worries! Read more over at Pistonheads.