1967 Lotus Elan and Mazda MX-5 Super 20 Concept - CAR and DRIVER

50 years ago, a small car company in England produced a sports car that changed the way people thought about fast cars; That car was the

lotus

alarm and the car it spawned, the Mazda Miata, changed the industry almost significantly. We're here today at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca to take a look at the lessons these cards can teach us. It's funny that Laguna is one of the few magical slopes in the United States. It is sacred ground, but it is also a name that everyone recognizes. It's cool because you drive a car like an MX. 5 or a grass here you drive something that actually works very well and it's the track just disappears underneath you and there aren't many race tracks that have the same kind of flow and personality that this place has when you take a spin. around this track in this car and on the line too, you just don't want it to stop, so this is a

1967

Lotus Elan, it has a fiberglass body, a double overhead cam four-cylinder that makes about 100 horsepower and weighs about 1500 pounds and this one came out of

lotus

at a time when its founder colin chapman was still deeply involved in running the company, everything they built and placed in a showroom It was designed to make money to keep the racing team afloat, meaning the profit margins on everyone had to be really slim, so you come into this and there are a lot of borrowed parts.

The front suspension came from a Triumph Spitfire, so right down to the steering rack, the rear suspension is unique to the car, but it's so thin, light and delicate. It can be, and as a result, you know the doors are light enough to open with a breeze. The hood doesn't actually have hinges, it just sits on the body of the car, you can lift it up with one hand. everything in it has been reused elsewhere and yet it runs very well and feels at home here, so you may wonder: okay, so it's a car made from someone else's parts, that's a lot of things from a lot of different parts, but how is it special?

Well, what makes it special is the lotus character of it all. Lotus has always been known for taking collections of fairly mediocre parts and turning them into something really special and that's what ended up with something that has a near perfect weight of 50 50. front rear and left and right layout in original form, it has a spring very smooth and rides very well even though it generates a lot of grip now, that was the Lotus philosophy at the time was that everything had to have plenty of suspension travel for the lumpy British b-s. roads and be really comfortable and as a result it drives better than a '60s jaguar, it drives better than a lot of '60s American cars and it still handles very well and what I mean is very well, I mean which is the benchmark and was the benchmark for It was 20 or 30 years for what a sports car should be when it came out, nothing drove like that, nothing was so docile and predictable that your grandmother could get in this thing and drift it, It was completely modern then and the surprising thing is that it still feels modern.

Now, the byproduct of the way this car was built is that there are a lot of cheap touches, you know, in the early cars, there's a tension rod that holds the windshield up, it actually keeps the glass from coming out of the frame. flexible fiberglass and you go over the bumps, the other cars that were just a repurposed bike talk, you know, the gauges basically came out of a late 50s early 60s British sedan, they're nothing special, You don't look at them, they don't make you feel anything. the chrome is very thin and chips easily and none of the hardware feels substantial but you don't care it's in no way a premium car because you get in it you drive it and it overpowers everything else now the miata , the miata. it's the same basic updated theme and remember the car came out in the late 80's when the first MX-5 came out, cars like this were gone but what the miata guys did was take the spirit of this and translate it there and As a result, you know the car has similar balance, the steering is really good, it has a relatively pedestrian engine that makes a decent amount of horsepower, but it feels like you don't think about the relatively inexpensive interior parts, you don't think about the fact that the sheet metal is thin, you don't think about the fact that on a highway it's loud because the car is so much fun, they focused on what matters about this thing and they just turned it up to 11.

So the original mx5 is blank. canvas in a lot of ways and what most people end up doing is add a little more power add a little brake add a little more tires a little more suspension geometry and that's what Mazda did here, the best This is that when you approach its handling limits, when you're really using everything it has, it's still an MX5 and it's like an alarm in the sense that deep down you still feel the goodness of the car no matter what you throw at it. you do. I can't take that away, no matter how much you change it, the MX-5 looks a lot like a Porsche Boxster or an Elan or any other tiny little car throughout history that gets criticized for being effeminate, or for being a car. girly or delicate, and you don't That doesn't matter to me because if you really know what you're doing, you get in it and you drive it and it just makes up for its looks and you love the cheeky smile on the front, you know you look at the Elana and you They look at this thing and they both have the same expression on their faces, but they both say something like what's up, let's start now.

The best thing about this is that it's a fast car that you can actually use. on a highway, you can drive this thing down a mountain road and give it an absolute beating and have your foot on the ground 90 of the time and yes, maybe you'll be breaking a couple of laws, but you won't endanger anyone ever feels that You're doing something stupid, it's so progressive and easy, there are so many things that aren't here that all you end up thinking about is the road you're on, how you drive, and how fun it is. you're having it is just transparent, you hammer both things through the corkscrew and when you feel the whole chassis just move and settle, it just makes you laugh, you just let this thing out, this improvisation, you just laugh and that's what we have to remember .

As cars become thicker, more complicated and more powerful, as roads become clogged with traffic and the environment becomes a bigger and bigger problem and fuel economy is paramount, speed will matter less. (it almost already is) and cars like this have a lot to teach us because they value emotion. by the numbers I get out of this and I never want to drive anything else I get out of a miata and I think the rest of the auto industry is ruined, that's pretty important and worth remembering if we don't remember We're going to end up with 4,000 pound sports cars and 600 horsepower that you can't use anywhere and no one likes to drive.

This is supposed to be fun and that's the great thing about these things.