LOTUS Elise

摘要

WHAT WERE YOU doing on Christmas Eve in 1994? If you were a Lotus engineer, you weren't settling down in front of the box to watch a Christmas special. The team had been burning the midnight oil in order to get a running prototype of 'Project M111' to perform a lap of their Hethel test track before the business shut down for the holiday season. And things weren't exactly going to plan. Deadlines were tight. Customers had been promised their cars in 18 months and everything about this vehicle's bones were new. The first aluminium chassis had arrived from Norsk Hydro a month before and was a thing of wonderment for a company that was still building steel-backboned Esprits - a car whose origins dated back to 1975.