Lotus Elise Cup 250 versus original Lotus Elise S1

Drop down into the cabin – and it is some drop – and you are reminded right away just how minimalist these cars once were. Bare aluminium is everywhere, the dashboard a simple strip along the width of the car with a pair of Stack dials mounted in a pod in front of you. A spindly gearlever sprouts from the centre of the car. I love it in here, particularly details such as the drilled aluminium passenger foot rest and perforated window winders. This is what you hope for from those weight obsessives at Lotus.

The K-series engine still sounds good, which is to be expected. The bigger surprise is that it still makes the 16-year-old Elise feel fast – properly fast – by the accepted standards of fast modern cars. There’s plenty of torque, and if the gearchange were a little swifter around and tighter within its gate, the powertrain would be near faultless. I remember that, too.

However, it's the poise I was searching for, that unique way the Elise addresses the road, and it didn’t take long to find. The steering on Steve’s car is a little heavier than I recall, quite possibly due to those bigger front tyres, but the feel is all there, and with it the confidence it inspires. The car is so supple, so good at shrugging off the challenge of crests, cambers and surface changes, that it makes you want to drive until the tank has run dry. Indeed, its softness and willingness to communicate are old-car characteristics, yet its pure point-to-point pace seems not one whit diminished by the passage of time. In this regard, it feels completely contemporary, and soon I realised that this blend of old-school subjective assets and raw ability that is absolutely up to date lies at the heart of the original Elise’s appeal.

I wasn’t interested in finding out how much faster the Cup 250 is than the old Elise, so I’ll restrict my comments to saying that on the track I would expect the gap to be greater even than their on-paper specifications suggest, not least thanks to the modern car’s extreme track day tyres, the genuinely effective downforce of its optional carbonfibre wing and the increase in brake disc swept area. Conversely, on most public roads there’d be little in it, because the old car is still so rapid - to actually drive the Cup 250 in the way that would be needed to significantly outpace the early car from one place to the next would probably require a driving style which is now deemed socially unacceptable.

I was far more interested in seeing what flavour of the old Elise remains now that surely they have very few parts in common. And what is extraordinary, to me at least, is that it’s all still there. Drive a modern turbocharged, water-cooled Porsche 911 Carrera and you’d recognise very little indeed of the normally aspirated, air-cooled 911 you’d have bought 20 years ago, with its stumpy wheelbase and hydraulic steering. Drive two Range Rovers 20 years apart and you’d recognise nothing at all.

Yet the Elise Cup 250 just feels like an old Elise that has spent most of the intervening two decades pumping iron in the gym. The almost liquid smoothness of the steering, the way it can be threaded with millimetric accuracy through gaps, and the fluency of its chassis seem so similar that it could only have come from the same place, and that place could only be Lotus.

You might think that now should be the time to be critical of a car that has moved the game on so little in such a long period of time, but that’s not how I feel. The history of the British sports car is littered with the corpses of those that started sharp, lithe and light and ended with their looks bloated, their waistlines widened and their driving dynamics dulled, and you have only to look at the E-Type Jaguar, Aston DBs 4 through to 6 and the MGB to know it.

Not so the Elise Cup 250. Heavier it may be, but it feels yet more taut, poised and ready for action. Put another way, in the past 20 years it has lost not one mote of what is important to its identity – its 'Lotusness', if you like – and gained a couple of other welcome assets in the form of pulverising grip and monster acceleration, which were never really pillars of Lotus street car heritage but are still very nice to find.