The Lotus Elise that bent the laws of physics | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Over the decades that followed I found it within myself to forgive Matt Becker, and for many reasons, including that no-one and least of all him had ever intimated I might be able to drive. He’s also now the director of vehicle engineering at JLR having previously done the same job at Aston Martin. And he happens to be a mate.

But back in 1995, he was at Lotus and far better known as the son of legendary Lotus chassis engineer Roger Becker. Roger, you may recall, was the man who delivered the S1 Esprit to the set of The Spy Who Loved Me. Then, after the official stunt driver had failed to make it look exciting, was asked to deliver the car back up the hill to where frustrated director John Glen was located.

Suddenly, Glen saw the Esprit being driven as he’d been hoping for all along. A simple drop off for Roger turned into a seven week on-location sabbatical. Watch the car chase today and every exterior shot you see is of an Esprit driven not by Roger Moore, or whoever was meant to be doubling for him, but Roger Becker. At least until it turned into a submarine.

Roger was also instrumental in the development of the car whose driver’s seat his son, Matt, was trying to keep me from. He’d started work at Lotus in 1966 and had worked on every new Lotus since, but in many ways this was the most important of all. It was called the Elise.

I mention this now because I’ve spent a bit of time recently driving a car that started life as an original S1 Elise, but which has now been given a very thorough and refreshingly thoughtful update by Analogue Automotive, going through all aspects of its suspension, engine and transmission to make an Elise that goes both in a straight line and around a corner like no other I’ve driven in the intervening years.

Because drive the Elise I eventually did a few months after, a ride in Matt’s passenger seat merely hinted that this could be the most significant new Lotus since the original Elan. It did not disappoint. It was everything I had always wanted and expected it to be: technologically advanced, with a design touched by genius and a total mass that near enough defied gravity. With their revolutionary aluminium brakes, those early cars weighed just 725kg, almost exactly half the mass of the company’s current mid-engined two-seater, the Emira.

I can remember driving it along one of our familiar moorland testing roads and witnessing a car that appeared to circumvent the laws of physics. How could something ride so preposterously well while, at the same time, controlling its body movements so brilliantly? How could a steering system provide so much of the feedback you did want with so little of the kickback you didn’t? Right there, right then, I knew that Lotus was secure for as far into the future as you cared to look.

In an era where a seven-year product cycle was considered the norm, the Elise lasted 25 years, in which time over 35,000 were built, almost three times more than the next most successful Lotus, the original Elan.

Once I’d driven Analogue Automotive’s modern take on the Elan theme, someone asked me whether I’d prefer it with all it’s phenomenal speed and poise, or an original with its soft suspension and very modest power output. And now you’re expecting me to come over all purist and say that the car was never better than in its earliest iteration, but actually? I’m still not sure I have an answer the question, and that’s the point.

Whether it’s an untouched car with just 120PS (88kW) or a fire-breathing monster turned up all the way to 214PS (157kW), the essential design of the Elise is so good it adapts as well to both utterly disparate roles just as Christian Bale does when playing Batman or Ken Miles. It was (how strange even today to talk of it in the past tense) one of the most clearly conceived, brilliantly executed cars of any kind or era. I suspect that, sadly, we will not see it’s like again.