Our Cars: Lotus Elise S1

I limp back into the car park that constitutes the pits of the Hethel test track. The rhythmic pulsing under my right foot, a message not just being relayed through the brake pedal but the steering wheel, is exactly what I was afraid of. I’ve only gone and done it; the one thing you’re supposed to be careful of… I’ve warped the once state-of-the-art, unobtanium MMC (Metal Matrix Composite) front brake discs.

It was a risk I thought I’d managed well: short session lengths, decent gaps between them and plenty of cool down time on a damp track. But now I’ve stuffed it; I’ll have to take the high tech lightweight brakes off the car, throw on some cheap and nasty iron ones and in the worst possible way (adding unsprung, rotating mass) ruin the lightweight purity that is the whole raison d’être of not just any Elise, but especially an early S1.

What makes this worse is that I’ve been coming to the conclusion that the Elise might just have to be sold, to make way for the latest addition to the stable – a 1960 Elva Courier race car. And given I paid top of the market for the Lotus three years ago (£19,500), on the grounds it was a rare early car with outstanding history, destroying one of its USPs is right up there in full facepalm territory.