40 Years of Lotus’ last F1 Championship
Reliving the year of Lotus’ final F1 title with a drive in a 1978 Esprit S2 Championship Model. PLUS...
Pride, so the aphorism has it, comes before a fall. But without a sense of pride we wouldn’t celebrate anything. And what better way to commemorate winning the Formula One World Championship, as a manufacturer of both road and racing cars, than to build a special-edition run of your mid-engined sports cars finished in the same eye-catching livery as the victorious racers?
It could be argued that Ferrari does this every time a customer ticks ‘Rosso Corsa’ on the order form, but for others perhaps there’s a sense that to do so would be tempting fate. After all, in October 1978 the Champagne spray was barely dry on Mario Andretti’s racesuit when Lotus unveiled its 99-example Esprit S2 Championship Model. Yet no-one would have bet that the most successful team in Formula One for the previous 20 years would never win the World Championship again. Perhaps the cracks were beginning to show right from the start – ironically, the Esprit couldn’t wear the intended JPS branding from which the colour scheme was derived because Martini stepped in to provide Lotus sponsorship for 1979 just as the car was about to be launched. The official name was World Championship Commemorative Model. Cumbersome.
I meet this Championship Esprit in a very Seventies location. The sheer rock faces and shale-bedded car parks of Cheddar Gorge resemble the kind of quarry setting favoured by poster photographers and marketing men back then, and in the car’s presence I can see why they liked them. The starkness of the pale rock both complements and accentuates Giorgetto Giugiaro’s uncompromising design. Its radical horizontal lines form a simple, acute-angled arrow that carves an opaque light-sucking slash into nature’s canvas wherever it goes, sun glinting off the gold graphics like the event horizon of a wedge-shaped black hole.
This simple boldness of presentation, coupled with the fact it’s an Esprit S2 – built before oversized bumpers and off-the-shelf BBS split-rim wheels gave the 1981 S 3 a clunkier, more product ionised look for the bodykit-crazed Eighties – serves as a reminder of how Giugiaro’s design made it from concept to early production relatively unscathed. It’s impractically waist-high, and sports a completely flat trapezoidal windscreen swept by a large single wiper. Things like this were usually rationalised out of supercar design, Lamborghini Countach excepted, even in the Seventies.
Once I’ve negotiated its combination of narrow-opening door, low roof and protuberant seat bolster, I find myself in a snug, comfortable recline in an interior as radical as the body, with its sloping dashboard separating the cabin into faintly aeronautical pods, the binnacle of instruments appearing to float on top of the sloping dashboard. Again, it’s unmolested artist’s-sketchpad stuff, of car interior reimagined as spacecraft cockpit to the point where you ignore all the British Leyland parts-bin fittings.
Two things differ from the standard Esprit S2 though – a threespoke Momo steering wheel bearing Mario Andretti’s signature, which blocks the voltmeter and fuel gauge completely and obscures the top quartiles of the speedometer and tachometer; and a rubber (rather than wood-topped) gearlever. Both seem incongruously aftermarket until I remember where I’ve seen them before – when peering into the cockpit of Andretti’s old Type 79 Formula One car. Forget the instruments – the wheel is absolutely dead-ahead and perfectly angled for an F1 driver’s straight-armed quarter-to-three grip. The shorter gear lever is at wrist-flicking height and an instinctive drop away on the centre-console. The
sill-mounted handbrake engages with a single ratchet click. This isn’t sci-fi flamboyance, it’s a stylised racing tub.
The engine takes a while to catch, the whirring of its startermotor bringing the concept-car dream down to parts-binfurnished, glassfibre-moulded Earth for a moment before the carburettors breathe life into the engine. For something that competed directly with the Maserati Merak and Porsche 911 when new, the Esprit’s four cylinders were sneered at by the motoring press, but this overlooks how exotic its specification was for the time. This was the only production engine available at the time to sport twin overhead camshafts and four-valve cylinder heads. Nowadays it sounds underwhelming because most hot-hatches have this plus fuel injection and turbocharging, but in the Seventies, this was racing technology for the road. Ferrari didn’t follow suit until its V8 Quattrovalvoles a decade later.
The slant-blocked engine gives off a deeply percussive timbre at cruising speeds, but there’s sophistication here. I take my first foray towards the Esprit’s torque peak as the bends straighten out at the top of the Gorge and there’s a smooth, if stridentsounding progressiveness, clearly unhindered by excess weight. Then an extra kick of torque seems to arrive at around 3000rpm and the carburettors’ cackle flattens out into a sibilant whizz. The acceleration never lets up, though – it matches the 150mph Ferrari 308GTB, Maserati Merak, Porsche 911SC and Lamborghini Silhouette almost figure-for-figure for acceleration all the way to 125mph, and even at that point it’s still got more to give. The greater displacement of the Esprit’s rivals saw them better its 137mph top speed. However, I’ll wager few of those Seventies supercar owners ever drove their cars much faster than they could have taken an Esprit anyway.
But what the Esprit does better than all of these cars is make its performance manageable. Its lightness and the racer-style longitudinal mid-engined layout means there’s very little sensation of weight transfer when setting the car up for fast corner attacks. The tiny pedals are closely-spaced but if you come prepared with narrow-soled driving shoes, heel-and-toe downchanges are made easier by the small pedals because there are no broad footpads to clip the edges of.