PARALLEL LINES
Alpine’s A110 confirms the rightness of Lotus’s fanatical approach to lightness, says
LOTUS DIDN’T INVENT LIGHTNESS, BUT IT WAS the fervour with which it pursued the mitigation of mass that set the company and its cars apart. The Elise was never the lightest ‘proper’ Lotus road car – the original eggshell Elite weighed just 503kg – but it is surely one of the best expressions of the pursuit of lightness. Especially as it came at a time when cars were not only getting heavier, but relying on ever-increasing power to go faster.
Here was a car that bucked that trend in unique fashion, chasing pure and simple pleasures with breathtaking singularity of purpose. It was this mindset that dictated packaging and refinement were secondary to lightness and efficiency. Too tall? Tough luck. Too much NVH? Buy an MX-5. Weight was the enemy to be repelled at all costs. Well, all costs apart from financial ones. This was Lotus, after all: a company that prides itself on development budgets as skeletal as the cars.
Want further evidence of the Lotus ethos? Look no further than the MG F. Launched less than 12 months ahead of the Elise, the MG was also a millennial, midengined two-seater. It even shared the same Rover K-series powertrain. We’ll ignore the fact it wasn’t blessed with deft lines penned by Julian Thomson, and instead we should focus on weight alone. Kerb weight for the 1.8i MG F? 1060kg. Kerb weight for the S1 Elise? 725kg. Take a bow Mr Richard Rackham, chief engineer on the Elise project and one of the most modest yet brilliant people you could ever wish to meet.
It’s hard to conceive of a car that cost so little, yet introduced so many genuine innovations. The bonded aluminium chassis gets all the plaudits, but the Metal Matrix Composite brakes are forgotten stars of the show. Not because they didn’t work in a road car application (you just needed to understand the principle of adherent friction versus conventional abrasive friction), but because Us-based Lanxide Corp – the company that pioneered the manufacturing process for the lightweight silicon carbide aluminium discs – went bankrupt.
Another oft-overlooked quality of the Elise was its intuitive understanding of how minimising a car’s footprint cannot fail but maximise its on-road exploitability. With more room to play with, you don’t need to keep a car so rigidly clamped down. Freed from the need for magnetlike road-holding, the Elise’s tyres could be skinny, which in turn negated the need for wide, heavy wheels. Likewise power-assisted steering.
The result was a car that flowed like water, gracefully preserving momentum where bigger, heavier, more powerful cars required a degree of roughhousing to extract their speed. There’s no such thing as the perfect driver’s car, but the Elise was about creating virtuous circles within circles: literal, metaphorical and philosophical. Zen and the Art of Sports Car Engineering.
It’s no coincidence that of all the sports cars to come and go between then and now, the one that resonates most is the Alpine A110. For starters it’s breathlessly pretty. It also relies upon a powertrain derived from more humble hothatch stock; a rare example of thrifty and nifty being one and the same.
Given the collective awareness of how a lighter sports car is – in theory at least – always better than a heavier one, it’s bemusing how truly lightweight sports cars are like comets, only brushing our consciousness every few decades. You’d think we’d have nailed it by now, yet the A110’s razzledazzle is almost entirely due to its pursuit of lightness.
A look back through the evo archives confirms as much, with Alpine’s then MD, Michael van der Sande, nailing what it is that continues to make the A110 a stand-out sports car in the Elise mould: ‘A very lightweight sports car that punches above its weight in terms of performance is very relevant, not just in the ’60s and ’70s, but also today.’
The engineering team behind the A110 were fanatical about weight, which is why the scales tipped at 1103kg. The class-leading Porsche 718 Cayman, benchmarked by Alpine’s engineers throughout the development process, was more than 230kg heavier. The A110’s aluminium structure alone is reckoned to have saved 180kg compared with a steel one, while the very compact dimensions – the A110 is 20cm shorter than a Cayman – also helped to keep weight down.
Obsession was an intrinsic part of the Alpine’s genesis, as evidenced by chief engineer David Twohig’s admission that he lost sleep toying with the idea of fixing the passenger seat in position. Eventually he decided the 500g saving wouldn’t have been worth the inconvenience, but as ever it’s the thought that counts.
Funnily enough, just as the Elise was scaled around engineer Rackham and designer Thomson (both compact chaps), so the Alpine was built to accommodate van der Sande. Perhaps if the boss’s frame hadn’t measured a full six-foot-seven (the 99.9th percentile for height) the A110 could have been smaller and lighter still. Then again, if vds hadn’t pushed the project with such passion, mission creep would surely have manifested itself in less obvious areas.
The parallels between Elise and A110 are uncanny. For starters the aluminium construction of the latter is almost entirely informed by the former, with a combination of 800 rivets and 6kg of glue holding the chassis structure together. It goes a step further than the Lotus, in using aluminium for the bodywork instead of glassfibre. And, of course, the engine shares a capacity of 1.8 litres, albeit augmented by a turbocharger and mated to a seven-speed paddleshift transmission.
‘THE PARALLELS BETWEEN ELISE AND A110 ARE UNCANNY’
As with any comparison separated by decades, context is everything. Drive an Alpine immediately after an S1 Elise, or indeed an S3 Elise, and it feels larger and heavier than it needs to be. Yet if you accept the Elise to be the throwback that it is, the Alpine stands alone.
No pun intended, but there’s a lightness of touch to everything the A110 does. From the smooth, unadorned profile that speaks of smart underfloor aero to the delicate design details that pepper the entire car, the Alpine reeks of knowing, thoughtful engineering. You feel the difference from the moment you open the (light) driver’s door, and from there you can enjoy the benefits of avoiding unwanted weight in everything it does.
Power-assisted steering lacks the purity of the unassisted Elise, but ironically it’s also considerably heavier than the S1’s unnerving lightness, which felt for all the world as though the car had been set on axle stands and the front wheels removed. Both have a mildly unsettling lack of feel for the first split-second of steering input, but familiarity brings the confidence to commit knowing the car is under you. Deftness and clarity is an Alpine trait, as is suppleness and an ability to work with the road. It sets the tone for a driving experience that majors on subtlety, precision and the ability to build a tight bond between car and driver.
Looking back once more to early coverage in evo, Steve Sutcliffe – a man who has been testing cars across four decades (sorry mate!) – knew the bold new Alpine was the real deal from the moment he rode in it: ‘The A110 glides across the ground in a similar way to an early Elise, in that it appears to have huge grip and composure but also a beautifully fluid ride. There are no harsh edges to its responses. Instead, the springs and dampers appear to be able to deal with just about anything they encounter.’
His words proved prescient, for from the moment we drove the A110 we knew it was something truly special. Indeed, that belief has been borne out in the fact we prefer the regular A110 to the A110S – a car that promises more on paper, yet in our opinion only serves to underline the validity of a less-is-more approach. What’s beyond doubt is that both models stand alone in pursuing a path of performance that sets the A110 apart from even its deadliest and most accomplished rival, the Porsche Cayman.
Ultimately the Alpine tugs at the same heartstrings as the Elise, only with a little more panache (quilted leather anyone?) and more concessions to daily driving. In terms of an outright expression of purity, an early Elise remains the benchmark, but there’s no doubting that if Alpine hadn’t adopted a Lotus-like approach to the design and development of the A110 it could easily have ended up being a latterday MG F. Or worse, a French Alfa 4C, arguably one of the 21st century’s greatest sports car travesties.
As it stands, the Alpine is testament to the enduring validity of the Elise’s exacting code. All credit to those who made it happen. Few cars at any price feel so special, which only confirms that lightness equals rightness.