Lotus elan Front Suspension Action.

The front suspension of the elan has always been considered to be very well designed.

And as Peter Egan of Road And Track Say’s.
The Elan definitely gets the Pure Exquisiteness of Driving Award. It’s the ballet slipper of sports cars, with an urgency and immediacy usually found only in single-seater racing cars. I suspect light weight is at the core of it, along with that magical Colin Chapman suspension geometry. (Source: (The Allure Of The Elan – Road & Track Mag)

And as good as the original Chapman designed suspension is, if you lust for more, there is actually room for more front end improvement if you want to chase that extra degree of handling, achieved through having a fully adjustable suspension to enable more precise toe, caster, and camber settings, corner weighting can also yield significant gains in the handling department, but that’s another story.

Firstly, let’s just touch on some of the things that can be improved.

A famous Chapman quote was; “Make it adjustable and they’ll get it wrong”, he was referring of course to the front suspension, and what he said certainly has some truth if you do not know what you are doing when it comes to the set up of the front and rear suspension, the days of using a length of string and a T square when aligning are long gone, it takes special knowledge and equipment to make precise camber, caster and toe adjustments in order to get the very best from any suspension, but in order to do that. there needs to be the facility for “adjustments”.

For a double wishbone set up like the elan, it is of great advantage to have adjustable upper wishbones, these are normally fabricated tubular wish bones fitted with threaded inner adjusters, essential for adjusting and setting certain suspension handling characteristics, especially if the car is to be used in track competition, or a better handling road car is desired.

Finite suspension tuning can take quite a bit of time and effort to “get right”, but once it’s where you want it, there wont be much more that can be done to improve things.

We are not suggesting that you go out and modify your elan if you are entirely happy with the current handling of your car, we are merely outlining what we’ve done to markedly improve the handling of our S2 elan.

We’ve produced a video below that shows a lotus elan front suspension at work on a typical Australian minor road leading up a short, sharp twisty hill climb,  notice how compliant the suspension is, and it’s quite amazing at just how little the front wheel moves (Steers) as the car is driven through a couple of sweepers and through several very tight corners on the hill climb, we had fun filming this, (Timing the run with out other traffic around) we hope you enjoy watching.

The elan is the kind of car that can almost think it’s own way around a corner, there are plenty of journo statements like, “corners like it’s on rails” or “It goes where you point it” and plenty of other superlatives, but as elan drivers, we all know how entertaining they are to drive, but imagine if you could improve the handling even more.

Lotus Elan Front Suspension In Action.

At the end of the short video, we also show some of the bits used in the suspension, we are not selling anything here, this is just pure elan owner driver infotainment.

Enjoy.