Autocar - First for car news and reviews

What is it?

This is the Lotus Exige S 260, the Lotus for track day enthusiasts who, strange as it may sound, think that a regular Lotus Exige S isn't quite hardcore enough.

The Lotus Exige 260 is lighter and more powerful than the standard S, thanks to some details from the Exige Cup race car, including a power upgrade to 257bhp (the regular Exige S has 218bhp, the Exige S 240 has 237bhp). The 0-60mph time falls from 4.1sec to 4.0sec.

There’s a prevalence of carb...Read the full article

 The interior picture shows a dash with airbags and stereo and a lot of carpeting.

This does not match what you say in the article ??

Yeah, most of the deleted items stay available as options; some of which Lotus had fitted to its test car.

 

Matt you are a seriously lucky chap. It must be an awesome experience.

At £42k this is starting to compete with some other pretty serious trackday machinery, and also starts to look a bit pointless as a road car. It's getting towards the pick your own one make series territory, and is more likely to be trailered to the track than ever driven there. 

It certainly looks tired and needs a new stlyist team, bar the chassis. I think Lotus's marketing team is just bashing the Elise chassis to death bordering annoyance. Would be interesting to see a list of all the Elise chassised cars since day one, including non Lotus cars such as the Vauxhall, Testa etc. I still think the first 190R is the coolest one, way cooler than any Exige.

Driving:

It certainly looks tired and needs a new stlyist team, bar the chassis. I think Lotus's marketing team is just bashing the Elise chassis to death bordering annoyance.

I don't think there is much wrong with the chassis, but the bewildering array of different track day specials to eek out every ounce of profitability does bore me a little. The bodywork is fibreglass, which is ideal for low volume production, and cheap and easy to retool, so I'm surprised we haven't seen more changes in the looks dept.