Yahoo Autos Lotus Exige: The Antidote to Distracted Driving
I am a leaf on the wind. The road twists and dives, and the car snaps after it, flickering like a zephyr between the trees. Little more than a thought sends the bright orange shape darting either left or right, so cat-quick is the response to steering and throttle. A crest. A dip. A damp hollow, suddenly slick under the R-compound tires.
Feel the abrupt crabwise shift of the hips, the flash of adrenaline - it's-okay-I-am-a-leaf-on-the-wind-aleafonthewind - then back comes the grip and on with the power. The buzzy four braps out its stubby single exhaust, the front left tire smacks off a catseye like it was hitting curbing, and the looney-tunes Lotus lunges forward with renewed vigor. This isn't flying. This is falling - with style.
It's fall in the Pacific Northwest, and a day like today feels stolen, swiped from beneath the dripping noses of the weather gods. They'll have me chained to a mossy rock for this one, a mildewy eagle neck-deep in my liver, but for the present, the day belongs to the sticky-fingered and light-hearted.
The Lotus isn't stolen, merely borrowed. It belongs to Steve Reed, recently moved to the west coast and eager to find new roads. An experienced motorcycle racer with a penchant for flatulent two-strokes, he bought this Exige as a sort of four-wheeled bike. As the British would say, it's properly mental.
The Exige, for those of you not versed in the Lotus bible (more a pamphlet, if we're honest), is a harder-edged version of the tiny, mid-engined Elise roadster. With an ordinary car company, such as Porsche, creature comforts would be removed, the word “dynamism” would be mentioned a minimum of 48 times, and the price tag would increase by $10,000 per second shaved off the Nürburgring lap time.
However, the Elise begins with all the creature comforts of an unvarnished board. Instead, the Exige adds to the Elise's lightweight charms with a new hand-finished fibreglass coupe body sitting over the aluminum chassis. The huge rear wing produces functional downforce at speed, and there's a scoop in the roof. Weight is approximately 1700lbs, about the same as you'd get if you attacked a first-generation Miata with a Sawzall.
Tucked just behind driver and passenger is a K-series Rover engine, ordinarily displacing 1.8L. The Exige builds upon the track-special Elise 340 variant, which got the VHPD (Very High Performance Derivative) version of the engine, making 190 hp. This particular car has had its engine reinforced to hold up to repeated high-rpm flogging on track, and is slightly bored out, to 1.9L.
Approximately 200 hp seems a bit of a stretch for a Very High Performance designation, particularly since the first-generation Exige was released in 2000 with the 240hp Honda S2000 as a contemporary. Further, the motorsports-specific tune on Reed's Exige requires octane booster to take readily-available 94-octane pump gas closer to 100.
Costly, raw, rare, and possibly deadly, the Exige is the pufferfish sushi of the automotive world. Lotus USA imported just eight of them, each one a left-hand-drive model plucked from European showrooms and reworked at Lotus' Hethel headquarters. Of those eight, five are reportedly in the hands of a single individual, used exclusively for track duties.
Reed's example is street-plated. After a solid five minutes of holding revs at 2000rpm to bring engine oil temperatures up to spec, it can be released on an unsuspecting public. With snow-capped mountains in the background, it heads out of the tangle of midday Friday downtown traffic, and in search of a suitable road.
Nearly every contributor to this publication has a soft spot for Lotus. From the hard-hearted to the hyperactive, each editor inevitably waxes lyrical over the attributes of Colin Chapman's best. Our web editor, at more than six feet tall, would have to first be fed into a Fargo-style wood-chipper to fit in the Exige's tiny cabin, but even he'd probably consider being mulched for a chance to get behind the wheel.
Why? Because they're magic. Or rather, because Lotus as a company understands something the rest of the automotive industry seems determined to ignore: The value of simplicity.
The Exige is incredibly noisy inside, even before you wind up the Rover inline-four. Surprisingly, the steering is very light, managing to blend unmatched feel with effortless weight. Rear visibility is nonexistent, but the postage-stamp footprint of the car has it darting through traffic.
Then, a slithering backroad, where the Exige comes alive with grip and four-cylinder fury. The speed is there, enough to breathe down the neck of a Cayman GTS, but it's not just the pace that you experience. It's the all-encompassing nature of the drive, the way the Exige seems to pressurize your head with sensation.
Every Lotus product I've driven has done much the same, from a '69 factory-assembled Seven, to a '84 Esprit Turbo. They are tiny machines, cramped and fragile-feeling. They can carry you, but not your baggage. There's not enough room in here for distraction, not for the tower of Babel of social media, not for outrage, not for worry, not for doubt. A Lotus exists only in the immediate. Perhaps this is why they're always breaking.
As an expression of this purity of spirit, the Exige is a distillation of a distillation. When I unfold myself at the end of the road, emerging legs-first from the cockpit with all the grace of a foal exiting a mare, it feels like I've had my brains walnut-shell-blasted. The air smells sharper, cleaner.
This is not the future that would be chosen for you. It's not even the present. The quickest of mainstream cars must now integrate with your phone, syncing up your connected life with your driving. Laws exist to keep you from checking your feeds, but semi-autonomous features seem designed to help feed the addiction.
The much-hyped autonomous car: Designed for a population with heads bent over screens. But they'd never be able to sell an autonomous motorcycle, and you don't need to ask yourself why.
The Exige is a blade, severing the umbilicus that keeps you tethered to the virtual. It puts you back in the world. There are other cars that pull the same trick: An air-cooled 911, an SR20-swapped 510, a Miata huffing boost, a Fiesta ST with a reflashed ECU.
We live in the golden age of the sportscar, but perhaps also an autumn for those of us who love to drive. Seasons are changing, technology has usurped simplicity, and our hero driving machines begin to become neglected or bloated.
But not here, not now, and not yet. There are sunny days yet, crisp with promise. Days when there's nothing more than the road, the wheel alive in your grasp, and a little orange Lotus; quick and light as a leaf on the wind.
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