Esprit de Col

‘Please Andrew, don’t be doing any more of that with this car.’ The words belonged to Lotus sales manager Scott Walker, the car to Colin Chapman until his untimely death in December 1982 aged just 54. The ‘that’ to which he was referring was the somewhat exuberant driving style I tend to adopt when driving Lotus (now the official plural) around its Hethel test track.

I’d been doing exactly that in a couple of Elises but such extravagant angles of attack in the Esprit were not so much over the limit as off limits altogether.

‘We’ve only just got it, it cost us quite a lot of money, it is completely unrestored, the tyres are ancient and we have no idea what kind of mechanical condition it’s in.’ So a gentle trot rather than a flat-out blast seemed more in keeping with the occasion.