About The Remarkable Lotus Elan.

The classic lotus elan is, in the writers opinion, one of the most inspiring and highly rewarding sports cars to drive. The elan provides a far deeper and exciting driving experience than most other British classic sports cars released during the 1960’s.

This was an an era where it has been said that “sex was safe, and motor racing was dangerous”, and if you grew up in this era, you would understand that statement.

With the 1960’s era sports car, nothing else really mattered but the pure thrill and enjoyment of the drive, compared to today’s cars, it was a very engaging “seat of the pants driving experience”, the enthusiast sports car driver typically understood the required car handling skills, such as, opposite lock to control a rear end slide, or heal and toe… giving the throttle a blip while braking at the same time during a manual gear down shift, skills that are almost forgotten by today’s generation of sports drivers, who have brought up on paddle gear shift, the elan is a world away from the overly sanitized, electronically stability controlled modern sports car of today… Some would say, that’s a good thing, but if you truly enjoy a total seat of the pants engaging drive, then a well set up, and well tuned elan is the car for you, period.

For many motoring enthusiasts, the dream was to own a sports car bred purely from it’s competition roots, a car that handled like it was on rails, went exactly where it was pointed, and was endowed with; a punchy high performance engine – ultra close ratio gearbox combination, plus a well designed all independent suspension package, along with disc brakes on all four wheels to complete the performance picture.

In that regard, the Lotus elan absolutely stands head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.

From the very outset, the elan design recipe was blessed with excellent power to weight ratio that defied the odds, providing exhilarating point to point motoring, the elan fulfilled the performance niche like no other sports car of it’s time, and even today, a tuned and well set up elan will match, or better the performance of many current cars of similar and even larger engine capacity, but what is quite amazing here, is that we are talking about a lightweight sports car, born about 1962… sixty one years Ago… And maaate, you have to agree, Colin Chapman was brilliant.

The Lotus elan, unveiled to the motoring world at the Earls Court Motor Show, was absolute light years ahead of it’s competitors, due to the cutting edge chassis and suspension design by Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus cars.

Upon release, the elan gained immediate success, and has now become a highly sought after, high performance classic ’60’s sports car. But on the downside, some people were overly critical of the lotus elan marque for being frail, and in some aspects, the factory body work was poor, but most long term elan owners have applied the fix, and have come to grips with its shortcomings, and there is no shortage of lotus specialists spread across the globe who can supply new parts as well as specialist maintenance and repair advice.

This lotus blog has risen from the desire of the writer who has now clocked up forty two years of constant elan ownership to share some knowledge about the elan, and several “How To’ articles, as well as various upgrades and mods that can be applied to the elan, the purist may not be in favour of making any changes at all from the original, and that’s fine, no one says that you have to change anything if you don’t want to.

But there are many things that can be improved “underneath” the skin so to speak, without making other people aware of the changes, unless they were told of course. There is nothing like having a classic sports car with a bit of chutzpah, brawn and street cred, all wrapped up in one successful, delightful mechanical driving package.

There is also no denying that owning a lotus elan can be frustrating, but also highly rewarding, the biggest plus with elan ownership is having the knowledge, skills, and a well equipped workshop to maintain and rebuild the elan as and when required.

If you don’t understand the elan, or you cant or unable to maintain it correctly, it will quickly turn into a dog of a car. And because of that, it is unfortunate that the elan, through the years has been maligned by people who should know better, simply through lack of respect and even less of an understanding of the elan, and to be honest, it would have been better if some of these people had never become involved with the Lotus Elan.

So, if you happen to be a dyed in the wool lotus elan purist, you may not want to spend the time reading through what we discuss and reveal on this blog, but if you are interested to know what can be done with an elan with sensible upgrades and various mods, then feel free to browse, you might even want to investigate some of our unique after market products to install into your own lotus elan, the most sought after being the world famous (Croucher Eng) elantrikbits CVDS Conversion, which will greatly improve the drive-line reliability, and help to lift the driving experience of your elan to another level.
Web site Link: www.elantrikbits.com

Grab a coffee, sit back, enjoy the read, and as time rolls on by, we’ll keep adding to the lotus collection of original articles.