“It feels a bit like we’ve gone back seven years and started all over again” says Lotus racing boss, Gav Kershaw, when I ask him what things are like up at company HQ nowadays.
“But that’s OK because all the stuff in the middle you can mostly keep,” he goes on to explain, with a mixture of cheekiness and complete bewilderment at what went on during the interim at Lotus, quite clearly evident in his tone.
I was up at Hethel – for the first time in a long time – to have a go in Kershaw’s new breed of racing Lotuses: an Lotus Evora GT4 – which was lovely but maybe a touch too easy to drive for an old school like me – plus a pair of Lotus Exige V6 Cup cars, both of which were stonking good fun, not to mention eyeball-wideningly quick, especially the V6 Cup R.
But the best part of all about my day up at Hethel, howling around in the company’s new club racers, had nothing to do with the cars themselves.
Instead it was the sense of relief evident in the people who still work there. Relief that the madness has at long last ended; that the virus has been identified and neutralised, and that – finally – things are returning back to normal again at Lotus.
To a point, in fact, where eventually they now feel the company may even begin to make money again in the nearish future, perhaps even as soon as next year. But whenever it happens, indeed even if they just break even next year (which seems more likely) it will be a very different situation – both financially and culturally – from the one in which the company found itself not so long ago.
Back then, during the Bahar SNAFU era, the creditors and suppliers simply closed their book on Lotus, having lost faith in the company to produce anything meaningful with the millions that it was spending on… not a great deal to be honest.
Post Bahar, Lotus has ended up with a nice new test track and some shiny new brochures for a range of cars that will mostly now never see the light of day, but that’s about it.
But, as they say, that was then and this is now. And right now, the good times aren’t so much rolling in at Lotus again as reappearing gently, just beyond the far horizon, albeit quite dimly lit.
Kershaw says, “There are five people from our Malaysian parent company (DRB Hicom) who work on the premises full time at the moment, and to begin with we thought we were being micro-managed by them, day in, day out. They wanted to know everything we were spending on, and why. And to begin with it p**sed us all off a bit.
Join the debate
Add your comment
But others are selling
I was optimistic about the
I was optimistic about the Bahar era, even though they were moving too fast with the product launches. It's easy for haters like Sutcliffe to criticise after the event but the plan was never given the chance to start making new cars, finances were pulled after promises to see it through. One tangible aspect of it was the significantly improved quality of the Evora which gave a taste of what could have happened. With the old business plan (that mysteriously people seem to endorse), the car side of the business was on a one-way ticket to bankruptcy.
So, my question to you Steve is this. You've claimed that Lotus Cars will soon be making money on production volumes barely into 3 figures. How are you justifying this? Why haven't you challenged Gav Kershaw's statement? Or did you conveniently forget to tell us that it's actually coming from the engineering/consultancy side of the biz? Be interested to hear your reply...
Friend here had an
Friend here had an Elise,which he wrote off,and I was tempted enough while in Montreal on vacation to go and drive one.it was superb,no doubt of the fun of light weight and good handling.Sure it s a plaything ,like a C63 Black Series,and I will look at the 4C if it comes here.I wish Lotus well but I agree lets be realistic that against the German Might it doesn't have much chance.That's why my daily driver is a C63 and not an XFR.