The Lotus Elan Turns 60

This week, the Lotus Elan turned 60 years old. There wasn't a ton of fanfare. Just a press release from Lotus, and not much else. Strange, given that the Elan is one of the greatest sports cars ever made.

The Elan was a revelation. Debuting at Earl's Court on October 17th, 1962 (though shown in magazines a week earlier), the Elan represented a radical departure for sports-car design. Unibody cars began to grow in popularity even before the War, but most sports cars in the immediate post-War era still used a traditional ladder chassis. The Elan used a simple steel backbone chassis running down the spine of the car, to which the fiberglass body, suspension, engine and driveline were bolted. The resulting car was very stiff and incredibly light, Lotus saying the very earliest Elans weighed just 1411 pounds. Even the later, more luxurious models, aside from the larger +2, never eclipsed 1600 pounds. The ladder-frame MG B, which debuted the same year, weighed over 2000 pounds. Today, the lightest sports car on sale is the 2341-pound Mazda Miata, while most weigh well over 3000 pounds.

This was a time of experimentation. As the world emerged from the shadow of the War, automakers seemed to make up for lost time, radically evolving the automobile. Lotus quickly moved from making a car based on the then-ancient Austin 7, to building some of the world's finest street cars.

Lotus founder Colin Chapman intended the Elan as a successor of sorts to the Elite, the company's first production street car. The Elite was a fatally flawed innovator. Its fiberglass body was the chassis itself—not unlike a carbon-monocoque supercar today—to which a steel subframe containing the engine, transmission and front suspension was bonded. Like the Elan, the Elite was light and stiff, but fragile. Worse for Lotus, it was ruinously expensive to make. The company lost money on every single one.

With the Elan, Chapman and Lotus took the ethos that defined the Elite and applied it to a car that would be easier to make. The original thought was to use a monocoque chassis like the Elite, but Chapman and designer Ron Hickman accidentally hit on a brilliant idea. Chapman bult a simple steel frame to test out the new driveline of the Elan while Hickman worked on the chassis. The frame weighed around 75 pounds and was twice as stiff as the Elite's monocoque, so why not make that the chassis? This meant the bodywork could be simple and light because it wasn't needed to provide structural rigidity. It would also be less delicate than the Elite and far cheaper to build.

Also cheaper was Lotus's new engine. The Elite used the Coventry Climax four-cylinder, an all-alloy unit originally designed for water pumps. The Coventry Climax was built in small numbers, and Chapman thought that Lotus could save money by using an engine based on something built in higher volumes, so it worked with Ford to develop a new twin-cam four. The basis was Ford's recently introduced iron-block Kent engine, which was fit with a twin-cam head designed by Chapman's friend and former Coventry Climax engineer, Harry Mundy. Lotus would use the engine in the Elan (initially in 1500cc form, but displacement was soon bumped to 1558 cc form) while Ford would get it in the Lotus-tuned Cortina sedan. Fed by Weber DCOE carbs, it made 105 horsepower in its earliest iterations. The contemporary Porsche 356 B 1600 Super has to make due with just 88 hp.

Suspension was by double wishbones in front and struts in the rear, with unusually soft springing all around. In what is now seen as a hallmark for both Lotus and English cars in general, the Elan works on the radical notion that a sports car can be comfortable and have excellent handling. In fact, a soft suspension helps a car handle better on England's crappy roads, and here in the States too. Use of soft suspension was enabled by the backbone chassis. Ladder-frame sports cars had to be stiff to keep all four tires on the road, but the stiffness of the Elan's chassis allowed Lotus to fit much softer suspension and achieve the same thing.