Having been a bit of a lurker for a while, I thought it’s time to get more involved and share my new (to me) car.
I have really enjoyed reading through the owners cars threads on here. It’s amazing how useful they have already been as reference points to help me tick off a few jobs in the short time I have owned the car.
Rewinding back the clock to 2014, after many years saving the pennies I bought my first Lotus, an S2 111S Elise. I would have loved an Exige, but couldn’t stretch that far. I also thought that I should start with the ‘softer’ Elise and possibly work up to an Exige at some point in the future.
It was a fantastic car and everything I had hoped it would be. It really got under my skin, with new friends made, many excellent runs around Kent and Sussex and more track days than I can remember. It also showed me that you shouldn’t be afraid to work on cars and just get stuck in.
Although it was (and still is) a lovely car to drive on the road, I eventually started to crave more power. I test drove a couple of Honda converted Elises and was very impressed. They definitely had the power box ticked and retained the lovely delicate, analogue feel of a light weight K series Elise. But knowing how much I have always loved the styling and philosophy of the S2 Exige, I knew that I had to try one.
In December 2021, I lined up a test drive at a very well known Lotus main dealer in the south east. It was a huge disappointment. The car looked amazing and the power was impressive, but the pedal feel compared my K series Elise was so binary and disconnected. I was gutted and started to wonder if assisted brakes and ABS on the Elise platform was really this crap. I asked some fellow Lotus owners what they thought and they assured me that it was not normal. Perhaps I just drove a car that needed some TLC.
With this in mind I set up another test drive with a different car later in the week. A 2008 S240. I loved it. The pedal feel was great. So different to my K series Elise and definitely not as delicate, but I knew that I could learn to adjust to it and the huge jump in braking power gave me massive confidence.
It drove beautifully, so I knew then that I was ready to let my Elise go. My Elise was sold and after a bit of negotiating over the course of a couple of weeks I picked this up:
I couldn’t leave it alone for too long. A friend was selling some RGB wheels, so the Y spokes were shod with ZZRs for track use and the RGB wheels snapped up for road duty.
I swapped the sump for an EP baffled number.
And then took it off and refitted it with sealant that worked (Loctite 5980) – thank you Kyle / Fonzey!
Checked over and cleaned up the brakes.
Sorted some stone chips…
And painted the engine cover plastic panels whilst fixing a dodgy spoiler fixing.
It’s a lovely car and I’m looking forward to getting to know it as well as I did with the Elise.
Yours looks very tidy indeed - nice car 
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