Lotus vs DeLorean
These two Brit sports car siblings might have emerged from turbulent times, yet both rose to greatness. We investigate their shared ancestry and consider what might have been…
Esprit S3 takes on DMC-12
You can’t explore the development of John Z. DeLorean’s ill-fated gullwing creation without talking about Lotus. The Norfolk firm did the lion’s share of the engineering work on the DMC-12, but that wasn’t always on the cards. For a long time, DeLorean had wanted Porsche to carry out the vital work on bringing his dream sports car to life. As a result, he started serious negotiations with the German firm in 1978.
Stuttgart’s finest had always been the first choice for General Motors’ former CEO. DeLorean’s dream of a world-beating ethical GT landed just after he saw a bold concept car, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. The Porsche Tapiro was the star of the 1970 Turin Auto Show and its wedge-shaped stainless-steel body and gullwing doors (sound familiar?) planted a seed in DeLorean’s mind.
The seed would germinate swiftly once he left GM in 1973. DeLorean had been frustrated by GM’s lack of risk-taking and conservative decision-making, and now at last free to make his own way, DeLorean spent the rest of the late 1970s shopping around the world for a factory where he could build a new and revolutionary car his way. However, the big three in the US ensured that he wouldn’t get one in their backyard. The bookie’s money was on Puerto Rico but a lastminute cash incentive from the British government was too good to refuse.
Around the same time, Porsche finally handed DeLorean its (fairly weighty, as it turned out) estimate for how much time and money it felt was needed to engineer his sports car. Porsche wanted a huge sum and four years to do it justice, something that simply wasn’t on the cards.
With a factory site now agreed in Belfast, an already highly attractive bid from Lotus Cars seemed more appealing; especially since Colin Chapman had promised the work could be completed in 18 months. John DeLorean therefore directed his considerable government investment in Hethel’s direction.
This was just the injection of cash that Lotus needed to comprehensively overhaul the Esprit. Far from starting with a clean sheet like DeLorean, Chapman and his team at Lotus had already sold ‘over 3000’ Esprits since 1975. Other sources placed that figure nearer 2200, but the point remains that the Esprit was already a success; – in low-volume sports car terms, at least.
The DeLorean deal not only unlocked more cash, but more importantly mass-production expertise and supply contacts that hadn’t previously been available to Lotus. Though undoubtedly a superb handling machine right from the start, the Esprit (in S2 and particularly original S1 form) had been created via the slightly uneasy process of force-feeding Chapman’s racing genius through a filter of compromised off-the-shelf components.
Now the money was available to create dedicated and optimised engineering solutions for the S3. The 1980 Essex Turbo project had shown engineers what was possible and the knowledge gained here would ensure that the latest Esprit would be the best yet. The S3 adopted that Turbo chassis and with it a whopping 50 per cent increase in torsional rigidity, mainly gained through its revised tubular engine/transmission frame.
The rear suspension was heavily re-worked with shorter top links allowing the driveshafts increased adaptability to changes in geometry. The track was also 18mm wider and power now came from a slightly revised version of the 2.2-litre Lotus twin-cam engine that had been developed for the Talbot Sunbeam Lotus.
It wasn’t the first Esprit to get this engine – that was the stop-gap, last of the line S2, called the S2.2 – but this was the first generation to get a displacement hike as standard. In both normaland turbocharged-aspiration, this powerful and reliable engine would provide motive thrust for several Lotus models through to the mid-1990s.
RECEPTION & PRODUCTION
A proof of concept was made to get DeLorean’s ambitious project from the drawing board to a running prototype. Colin Chapman and Mike Kimberley (Lotus CEO) flew out to Phoenix, Arizona in 1978 to evaluate it, but they weren’t convinced – the car was deemed to be gutless and even broke down on the highway. The worst aspect, however, was this prototype’s plastic/glassfibre chassis, which was just too experimental. Chapman himself had dabbled with the concept for the glassfibre monocoque Elite of the 1950s and knew that it was tough to achieve the rigidity needed for a sports car.
Reporting back with these concerns didn’t go down well, however. A disgruntled DeLorean, by now used to getting his own way, invited US Aerospace giant, Grumman, to test the prototype’s stiffness, only to be informed that the rear-mounted engine and transmission would crush cabin occupants in impacts as slow as 26mph. With this established, the decision was taken to leave the engineering largely to Lotus, which would use a modified Esprit backbone steel chassis in the DeLorean.
Realising what an enormous undertaking his 18-month delivery promise would be, Chapman asked fellow Colin – and recently retired Lotus lead engineer – Colin Spooner to return to Hethel to head up a dedicated DMC body and chassis staff of 382 at Lotus Factory Six. The task was already a Herculean one but was soon made worse by John DeLorean’s decision to change the car’s styling ten months into the contract.
The original shape, inspired by a concept first seen nearly a decade earlier, would, it was felt, be outdated before it even reached production.
Eventually, once the car had been facelifted, Lotus delivered just seven months overdue, 26 months from clean sheet to production.
With the clarity of hindsight, it seems inevitable that such an ambitious project as DeLorean’s would run into production issues. The quality and reliability of those first DMC-12s were humiliatingly awful for the firm. Many had to be substantially re-worked once they reached the dealership to make them saleable. Though the blame is often levelled – rather unfairly – at the largely untried Northern Irish workforce, the truth has a lot more facets to it.
The first cars that left the Dunmurry line early in 1981 were constantly evolving; they were more like production studies than finished cars.
Parts and panels weren’t lining up and revisions from the engineering and supply departments – even DeLorean himself – were arriving almost daily, making the business of keeping track nearimpossible. Add to that a VARI injection underbody moulding process that only worked above 20 degrees Celsius, and severe teething problems were inevitable.
Those problems were gradually overcome, however, and the quality of the cars improved markedly – sadly just not quickly enough to mend their broken reputation or vastly inflated prices. The DMC-12 was supposed to retail for a relatively modest $12,000 ( hence the ‘12’ part of its name), but the asking price was actually an astonishing $34,000 by 1983.
At the same time, things were progressing with the new S3 Esprit much more smoothly over in Hethel, but the economic environment into which it was launched couldn’t have been much worse. Britain was in the grip of a recession and manufacturing across the country was groaning under the weight of strike action. While Lotus largely avoided the production stops that plagued the likes of Leyland and other massmarket makers, it still struggled to manage Esprit output.
Hethel’s smallest ever staff (301) made just 345 cars in 1981, but worse was to come when Colin Chapman suffered a heart attack and died in December 1982, shortly after John DeLorean’s bodged cocaine deal and the collapse of his company a week later.
Mike Kimberley took over after Chapman’s death and steered a shell-shocked Lotus Cars through some of the most turbulent times in its history. DeLorean’s collapse and the close association with Lotus – not to mention large sums of government cash that had gone missing – would go on to haunt Hethel long after the media frenzy died down.
There was some good news amid all the misery, however; the highly desirable production Esprit Turbo arrived in 1981 and began to find its market feet shortly thereafter. Total Lotus sales rose to 500 cars in 1982 and would top 1300 by 1988; tellingly, all but 244 of these were Esprits.
A star was born.