An icon of automotive design and one of Lotus’ longest running models, the Esprit played a significant role in enhancing the company’s mainstream appeal as a builder of covetable exotics in addition to the niche driver’s cars on which the company had built its reputation prior. A substantial portion of Lotus’ identity resulted from its approach to motorsport. The company’s founder, Colin Chapman, favored clever but simple solutions which made for light cars, and Lotus race cars were known as giant-killers, beating much more powerful and larger cars with regularity. Applied to road cars, this philosophy produced a number of iconic road cars including the Seven, Elite, and Elan, cars whose architectures and ethos still influence sports car design today.
The company values of clever thinking and innovation meant that Lotus was quick to adopt the mid-engined layout for motor racing, understanding that centering the mass in the car made it turn more easily thanks to a lower polar moment of inertia. In light of the transformative effect of mounting the engine amidships on Lotus racing cars, the company wasted little time in adapting the layout for road use. Introduced less than a year after the pioneering mid-engined Lamborghini Miura, the Lotus Europa appeared in December of 1966 and brought the handling revolution into the reach of an entirely new segment of the enthusiast market.
The car was reasonably priced, but not conventionally attractive, and with a Renault engine tuned up to 82hp paired with a 4-speed gearbox, the centerpiece of the Europa was handling more than outright performance. A Ford twin-cam and 5-speed in later Europas dramatically improved performance, but work on a clean sheet replacement, which would become the Esprit was underway by the early 70s.
It used a new twin-cam 16-valve engine, backed by a 5-speed transmission (sourced from Citroen where it was used in the SM and Maserati Merak), plus independent suspension and disc brakes all around. This was all properly sophisticated stuff, but it was the car’s exterior styling that really grabbed attention. Wedge-shaped concept cars began to appear in the late 1960s, while production-oriented designs really began with the 1971 introduction of the Countach concept, penned by Marcello Gandini. The Esprit concept was designed Giorgietto Giugiaro and appeared the following year at the Turin Motor Show, drawing heavily on Giugiaro’s earlier wedge concept, the Maserati Boomerang of 1971.
The Esprit concept was received with considerable enthusiasm and the car was developed over the following years, with a production version appearing in the Fall of 1975 at the Paris Auto Show. Production began the following June, starting a run that would last 28 years. Over the decades, the Esprit gained vents, spoilers, skirts, wings, cladding, plus one major and at least half a dozen minor redesigns. By the end of its production run, it offered nearly identical performance to the Porsche 993 Twin Turbo and Ferrari F355.
The early cars however offer exceptional purity of experience and design, the former with the twin-carbureted naturally-aspirated engine and manual steering, and the latter with the simple, striking concept car looks that were immortalized on the silver screen by a certain white Series I Esprit with a few optional extras.
Esprits, especially in the 70s and 80s, were not terribly well built and thus few survive, especially in truly exceptional condition. This example is one of those, a 19,000 mile car which is in beautiful cosmetically unrestored condition but which received a 1,000 hour plus $100,000 mechanical restoration in 2017-2018.
The car is an early example, built the year after production started, on the 29th of September, 1977. Originally supplied in the United States, it is one of 36 US cars made in this color, Norfolk blue. The car was sold new by Lotus Mid America Ltd in May of 1978, fitted with optional Blaupunkt AM/FM cassette player and air conditioning, bringing the total new price to $18,682.26, about the same as a new Porsche 911 and around half the cost of a Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9.
The car covered just 15,000 miles in its first forty years, when a collector acquired it in beautifully preserved condition. A mechanical freshening soon became a full-fledged restoration by his in-house mechanic, who separated the body from the chassis, refinishing the backbone chassis and all the mechanical components hanging from it, including the entire powertrain, driveline, as well as the suspension and braking systems. The restoration spanned 2017 and 2018, and in 2019, the car’s current owner acquired it, since covering an additional 4,000 miles.
Today, the car remains in spectacular original condition, with excellent original cosmetics displaying a few small blemishes but overall exceptional presentation, especially compared to the deterioration that these cars usually exhibit unless they have been restored. The overhauled mechanical systems function beautifully and the car must surely be considered one of the finest Series 1 Esprits in existence. It comes with substantial photographic documentation and detailed invoices from its restoration, as well as a Lotus Certificate of Vehicle Provenance confirming the car’s original colors, engine and transaxle numbers (both matching today), and date of manufacture. Also present is a copy of the original purchase invoice, original owner’s manual, tools, and jack.
