This week Steve took his Mazda MX-5 and Elan for a whirl in the Cotswolds to decide which one gets pole position in his garage. He also caught up with Autocar's ongoing task to digitalise our archive and got a peek of the future of Lotus.
Monday
Bit of Cotswolds fun: an impromptu comparison between my 2015 Mazda MX-5 and the 1991 Lotus Elan M100 I bought a few months ago. We’re limited for garaging at home, and I’ve always preferred to keep ‘resting’ soft-top cars out of the sun/rain so I rent storage nearby. The Lotus will soon need preparation for a bit of motorsport and is also making a summer concours debut, so the Mazda, freshly valeted, needed to make way. All of which required a 20-mile round-the-houses sprint, out in one, back in the other.
The cars’ road footprints are very close but otherwise they’re dramatically different. The Mazda’s nose is longer; you sit further back in the car. The Lotus cabin is the roomier. And there’s the front-versus-rear-wheel-drive handling thing, of course, with the Mazda predictably more adjustable in hard cornering. Lotus’s 1.6 turbo engine needs much more revs than the 2.0-litre normally aspirated Mazda, but the pair match performance almost perfectly. The Lotus ride comfort is eerily brilliant for a 30-year-old car, and the vaunted front suspension geometry designed to kill wheel fight under power works perfectly. The Mazda will have to fight to win back pole position in the home garage.
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If the Tamiya Wild 1 was a 1/10th model of a theoretical full size model, but the real life model of the 1/10th model is 8/10 scale, is the real life model actually full sized and the tamiya RC really 1/8th scale, not 1/10th?...
I'm also a fan of the M100 Elan, though sadly I've never owned one. As for the dreaded SUV... Lotus has history with cars like the Cortina and Carlton, so putting the badge on a family car won't be a first. If it comes out more like a Formentor (really just a tall hatchback) then I can live with it. Great shame it needs to be built in China though.
Your Elan looks so modern on those non standard eighteen inch wheels , I wonder how it rides ? I remember John Miles being very "anti" the adoption of the one inch larger wheels on the S2 Elan , I'm guessing in this age we've got so used to poor ride from big wheels that it really doesn't seem to matter anymore ?
It's really nice to see you loving the car, particularly as this magazine has denigrated the M100 several times in various articles, indeed one article insisted the car "wasn't really a Lotus", what utter rubbish ? It was such fun a couple of years ago at Thruxton Circuit to draw in a pass the much praised new Alpine in our family M100 , not bad for a twenty-five year old car ? As I've said before, I think at tight hill climb venues the lack of a limited slip differential will be a big problem, particularly in the wet, however the relative open spaces of Shelsley Walsh should be fine . I look forward to hearing about your progress.