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I Witnessed: Lotus launch five cars at once
4 years ago
How a new Elise might have looked
Proton had been patiently soaking up Lotus’s losses since 1996, and in 2009 it hired the 37-year-old Dany Bahar, formerly of Red Bull and Ferrari, to reboot Hethel. In less than a year he put together a supergroup of designers and engineers, including Donato Coco from Ferrari and Wolf Zimmerman from AMG, and built presentable bucks of his five new cars. There was a £30,000 new Elise, a £170,000 Esprit, a mid-engined Elan to rival the 911 at £80,000, and two front-engined cars, the Elite and the Eterne; the former a folding-hardtop DB9 rival, the latter a four-door competitor for the Rapide.
Oh, and two new Evora derivatives, a concept city car, three new clothing ranges, a new website and a new magazine. The Lotus stand was twice the size of Ferrari’s and the food was by renowned French caterers Lenotre. A few magazines had been briefed in advance on what was about to be revealed but the embargo held, and so when Mickey Rourke, Naomi Campbell, Brian May and Stephen Baldwin pulled the silk from the cars there was genuine shock.
"There was enough interest in Dany's plans for the Mail on Sunday to dispatch me to Hethel. But when it became clear that of the £850m required over ten years only £100m had been committed by Proton, my own optimism turned to cynicism"
The stand was mobbed. Lotus’s long-serving PR man, the burly Alastair Florance, was forced to play bouncer at the gate. I spotted Ron Dennis and Amedeo Felisa, the CEO of Ferrari, in the crowd with their entourages, trying to figure out if a company which had built just 1600 cars the year before could pull this off and become a rival.
It couldn’t, of course. Bahar was a divisive figure, and the usual Colonel-Blimpish antipathy to change at Hethel was exacerbated by his hubris. I remember feeling that major change was necessary if Lotus was to acquire the scale to become stable. But I wondered if it could be done with sports cars alone.
There was enough interest in Dany’s plans for the Mail on Sunday to dispatch me to Hethel soon after Paris for a five-page feature. But when it became clear that of the £850m required over ten years only £100m had been committed by Proton, my own optimism turned to cynicism.
Within two years, Bahar was gone, and his plan abandoned. Lotus is once again being reinvented, but this time with the deep pockets and patience of Geely, and with an electric SUV: the kind of car that will sell at scale. I was at the launch of the Eletre too, earlier this year in London. That event probably will turn out to be a turning point in Lotus’s history, but it couldn’t match the drama of seeing those five sadly stillborn sports cars revealed at once in Paris.
