The Exige S, then. Perhaps now more than ever, it feels like the sort of car Lotus ought to be making, arriving as it does at a time of considerable East Anglian turbulence.
This raw and focused model feels like a brutal counterpunch or the instinctive lunge of a wounded animal. The Exige S is an engineer’s car, seemingly conceived for the purest of intents: to go fast and to entertain wildly while doing it.
We have had Lotus’s latest on the site previously, and it has entertained us before, but until now Lotus has been reluctant to allow us to garner performance figures on what is likely to prove one of the quickest cars to emerge from Hethel to date.
Ultimately, and we did not do this lightly, we resorted to one of the book’s older tricks: obtaining the raw numbers first, and only later presenting them to the maker and asking how they felt about us uploading them.
“Oh, go on, then,” was the answer. Which is why you can now read the first test on the Exige S to explore its every nook, cranny and sinew as we find out just how capable, under all test conditions, it really is.
