How the Lotus Elise was born on Christmas Eve

CAR magazine had called it the car that ‘could make or break Lotus‘. So it’s perhaps understandable that the engineers toiling away on the Elise prototype worked long into the night on Christmas Eve 1994.

In fact, while most of the country was settling down to watch Stars in Their Eyes Winners’ Special or Bruce Forsyth’s Christmas Generation Game, ‘father of the project’ Richard Rackham and his team were preparing for the first run of the Lotus Elise prototype – known as Proto One.

This was Christmas 1994, nearly two years before the Lotus Elise would make its public debut at the 1996 Frankfurt Motor Show. It was also five years since Lotus had unveiled the financially disastrous M100 Elan.

The first chassis had arrived a month earlier, produced by the same Danish factory as the Renault Sport Spider. It weighed just 68kg and was put on display at Lotus HQ in Hethel so that staff could look at it.

A great Dane

Speaking to Hilton Holloway in 1996, Rackham said the bonded chassis was superior to that of the welded Renault. “Welding distorts the material and reduces the strength at the joint,” he explained.

“Because our chassis is bonded, it can be made with incredible accuracy. The hard points (suspension mountings and so on) are accurate to 0.5mm – unheard of in a conventional car.”

The Elise project team worked tirelessly to get Proto One running by Christmas Eve. At 6pm, there were still about 50 things to sort, but the team felt it could be achieved before the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.

Rackham, now head of vehicle concepts at Lotus, remembers: “The excitement had been building through the day, lots of people were guessing how much the running car would weigh and we had a little sweepstake going.

“The enthusiasm of the technicians, I’ve never known anything like it. We were all getting stuck in as we wanted this thing to roll. And at the time we even thought that it didn’t look half-bad – because love is blind – but looking at Proto One now, it was hideous!”

‘Not deliberately retro’

A little harsh, perhaps. While it lacks the supercar aesthetics of the finished product, there’s a frog-like charm to Proto One. It certainly tips its hat to Colin Chapman’s widely quoted philosophy.

It was essentially a rolling chassis with Lotus Seven-style mudguards, a rudimentary windscreen, two seats and a pair of frog-eye headlights. Technically attractive, but far from ready for Frankfurt 1996.

Lotus wanted the Elise to look modern with a nod to its history. “The Elise is not deliberately retro, but has some of those elements. Using retro elements is very much a contemporary move, and the Elise’s styling has plenty of modern touches, too,” said Rackham in 1996.

He slammed the styling of a trio of Italian sports cars, saying: “We can’t understand why the press are so enthusiastic about cars like the Fiat Coupe, Barchetta and Alfa GTV.

“To us, they’re not beautiful. I think we’ve made the right decision with the Elise: it’s beautiful in the way old cars are beautiful.”

The car’s beauty was a long way from the minds of the project team on Christmas Eve 1994. With the list of jobs complete, Rackham and project manager Tony Shute donned their crash helmets and headed out into the frosty air of a Norfolk night.

“It was icy, but a brilliant moonlit night; it was one of those magic moments,” reflects Rackham.

Star of CCTV

There’s little evidence of the maiden voyage. These were the days before smartphones were available to document such occasions. Besides, on Christmas Eve, most eyes would have been looking up to the night sky.

The only shots of Proto One driving on the test track were captured on CCTV cameras, as security officers diverted their eyes from tracking Santa to monitor the car’s progress from the comfort of the Lotus gate house.

Rackham recollects: “It was an amazing period, a real learning experience of what could be done, in a short time with the right team. We were only around 11 months into the project and already had a running prototype.

“A huge achievement for any company, but this was with a totally new vehicle construction technology. So not only were we developing a new car, we were in parallel conducting pioneering R&D into a technology that is now omnipresent in the automotive industry. And we were testing for the first time on a frosty Christmas Eve.”

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