JEDDAH: Provocative and powerful, two new Lotus sports cars, the Elise and Exige, were launched in Jeddah on Sunday. With them they brought the potential for Saudi drivers to indulge in the most automotive fun possible in a legal street car.
The company’s British founder, Colin Chapman, was an exceptional engineer with a passion. He built the finest handling sports cars possible. This he achieved, not through the application of power, but through the removal of weight.
Chapman famously said, referring to race cars, that “to make a car faster down the straight then give it more power, but reduce weight and it’s faster everywhere.” Light cars hold the road better through corners and the current Lotus range can pull a continuous 1.3 G through corners.
“Seventy Grand Prix wins, seven F1 constructors championships and six F1 driver’s championships rather proved his point,” said Alastair Florance, Group Lotus PR manager.
“When the idea of adding the Lotus brand to our group of luxury sport cars emerged, we carried out a study about the market situation and potentials for this kind of car,” said Ghassan A. H. Al-Sulaiman, chairman of Al-Ghassan Motors.
He added that he found that such a sophisticated sports car was not available in Saudi Arabia and thought it offered a great potential. Lotus made a brief appearance in the Kingdom in the late 1980s but has returned after appointing Al-Ghassan Motors as its Saudi dealers.
“It’s over a year since we started the project to re-introduce Lotus to the Kingdom,” Florance told the media at the launch. “The reason it took some time to launch was that we modified the cars specifically for the Kingdom over two summers of testing but retained all the handling characteristics.”
Lotus tested the Elise SC, the Exige S and the Exige Cup 260 in the Middle East, and made significant changes to them to cope with the high ambient temperatures and humidity, as well as the high levels of atmospheric dust and sand.
Modifications inwclude boosted engine cooling, twin oil coolers and extra cockpit cooling together with engine management and dust filtering modifications. “True to Lotus traditions, we minimized the weight. All of the modifications, standard on all cars here, added just 25 kilos to the weight of the car.”
The Elise and Exige are true sports cars. Sports suspension and preposterous amounts of aluminum and carbon fiber together with a middle mounted power unit provide it with real sports car ability. The steering — un-powered — feeds back road information.
