2007 Lotus 2-Eleven

General Owners Cars
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Blyton Update,

This trackday wasn’t on my agenda for the year - I got bullied into it. It was a private club day at Blyton Park organised by Jonny @ Performance Autocare. Did his day last year, and it was great fun with very low numbers - giving almost exclusive access to the circuit for most of the day.

Weather forecast looked good, car was feeling good, and hopefully would be an opportunity to see what I could do around Blyton after my last day got cut short due to my ECU faffing.

The day also had the benefit of seeing my old Exige lap around too.

I’ll cut to the chase on this one, because I didn’t take many photos and there’s not a huge amount to write about but:

  • Day was fantastic, ran well, very relaxed and good manners from everyone on track
  • Rarely saw another car on circuit, makes for boring footage but great for putting the car (and myself) through its paces
  • In session 1 I was already right on my best pace for Blyton, so felt like it was going to be a strong day. I usually gain 4-5 seconds as the day progresses.
  • In session 2 I’d smashed my PB by over 2 seconds (according to footage, etc), but had a couple of moments so toned it down a bit after that
  • Sessions 3 and 4 were more of the same, settled into a groove and got some really consistent laps in. From what my footage has showed me, I had five laps on the trot within half a second of each other. All of which quicker than my previous PB but still a second or so down from my total best.

By late morning the sun was out and it was getting proper hot. Kept an eye on the car, but nothing needed my attention.

This is easily the closest I’ve been to 10/10ths in the 2-Eleven, but there’s still more to come. I was pushing harder and harder into braking zones, and exposed a few weaknesses in the car/setup for the first time in the dry. Main observations were:

  • Rear a bit light on entry, but fairly sure this is all technique. Not quite getting off the brakes smoothly enough. Where I left a bit on the table with brakes, and got on the throttle earlier - the rear was planted
  • Quite big understeer mid corner. Still driveable, and didn’t feel like it was slowing me down too much. I think I prefer this, it feels safer and allows me to push harder.
  • Open differential exposed on exit, flaring the inside rear on a few corners. I was able to keep this in check by keeping the TC on a very relaxed setting, which just dulled the power enough to keep the spinning to a minimum.

It’s the first time since buying the 2-Eleven where I felt I could go faster with an LSD.

IAT’s crept up a bit by late morning, which has given me something to think about. With my 2.9" supercharger pulley, I can get to 300bhp but I’m spending 95% of my time in the ‘slower’ map which is closer to 270-280ish. Problem is, the blower is still working just as hard so I’m carrying the IAT penalty for that. It’s still well within safe limits, and I’m only losing a degrees or so of timing advance which is barely perceptible… but if I get to the end of the year and I’m still not brave enough to put 300bhp through the gearbox regularly, I may be better stepping the pulley size up a bit and going back to a single map with lower IATs. Food for thought.

Got to lunch time feeling pretty good, gave the tyres a quick check and visual inspection of the brakes, then found this.

End of day, the crack could have been there for a while for all I knew, or it could be brand new. Either way, there’s no way I could push on knowing it was there, and I didn’t want it to get worse and cheese grate my brand new Carbotech pads, which aren’t cheap! So car went back on the trailer.

I did have options to go home in the Volvo and retrieve some spares I had, or even pop over to Seriously Lotus and get some new ones - but by the time I’d done this, fitted them, bedded in, etc- it would have been nearly home time.

I’ve had this happen once before on my Exige, different discs (grooved rather than drilled) and different pads (Pagid RS14 vs Carbotech XP8). First time was considered unlucky, second time it’s making me want to put a plan together to avoid future issues. Still thinking about that, but I’m sure it will form a future update.

Day was far from ruined, nice environment to sit and get sunburned. Got a passenger session in my old Exige which felt fantastic.

I think this is the best lap from the day.

Lotus 2-Eleven at Blyton Park - YouTube

I think short term, some similar discs will go back on the car but I’ll maybe carry some spares with me.

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283

Rapid with a capital RAPID there Kyle. Have to be happy with that

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Wowsers, that’s some pace!

When your disc previously cracked on your Exige was it also the front?

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Fab. Just fab :sunglasses::+1:t2:

You are getting so much drive tome :heart_eyes:

Good to hear re the XP8’s. I am similarly very satisfied with them on the 340R.

Re discs I have been planning to contact PFC to see if can supply something.

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Cheers gents, was a fun day.

It was

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I took the cracked disc off at the weekend, put the good one from the NSR onto the NSF and put a crappy old lipped one on the NSR (would rather trash a rear pad than a front one) so I could take the car to the NYLOC meet at the weekend.

Went, didn’t take any photos, caught up with some people.

Got home and decided to clean off the Blyton scum, and also give my suspension/wheel arches a quick blast just to see how the new coatings are getting on after almost six months (already!!).

I didn’t get too harsh with any cleaning products, just a quick spritz with a heavily diluted Bilt Hamber Surfex stuff and a snow foaming as the rest of the car got done. Everything still looking good under there, I’d opted against painting the trackrod ends and balljoint caps for this refurb. They normally rust with the first sign of water, so historically had blobbed them with some silver hammerite. This time I just stuck a few coats of Bilt Hamber Dynax UC on it, till it got really waxy. Seems to have done the job.

I did find though that the OSF disc was on its way too, so this definitely isn’t some fluky material failure - there’s a lack of capacity to shed the heat I’m generating on these discs.

Whether I could manage this better with driving style? Not sure, I am pretty disciplined with warmup and cooldown laps, but perhaps I need to be better. They are basic, entry level discs as I’ve never wanted for more brake performance - but perhaps this needs changing.

Dragged a rag over the rest of the car too, but didn’t take any clean photos. Just trust me!

The car is driveable as it sits, but next outing is Donny on 13th June. I’m still collecting thoughts/parts for the brake solution, but if I can’t get everything organised in time I may just have to throw some more disposable cheap discs on to get me through the next trackday or two… and I’ll pack spares.

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Something seems amiss here.

Two sets of discs have cracked - are you using the same pads as you did in the exige?

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No, Exige cracked on RS14 from Pagid. These were on XP8 from Carbotech

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Only cracked drilled discs?

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Nope, sorry :rofl: first set were grooved.

No pattern unfortunately

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Elmo came with solid disks :hear_no_evil: so no cracks (same XP8 pads here) but I am watching with interest as I want to put on much lighter discs.

Going to Hungaroring on June 20 so I will be paying special attention to the discs after each session.

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293

Lovely write up. Have you tried ally belled that could help with the heat. What does Dave at Seriously Lotus reckon?

Enjoy Donny today!

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You can get the 295mm or I imagine the 308mm would also fit your wheels.

With the 308 you will have a lot of unswept area on the 2pots but no bad thing as more cooling.

Also either size will be better at cooling than your non ally belled discs. Will make them last longer as well.

Are you running 2 pots (the 4 pots might be a bit overbraked on a 211)?

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Just watched the video ad had to add another reply. Holy smoke, wow nice lap.
What a WEAPON!

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New update, pretty exciting one for me as I’ve been waiting for these for ages. Arguably since I bought my first Elise back in 2016 or whenever it was.

I’ve decided to upgrade my seats for a few reasons, in order of importance:

  • Mainly bling factor, the Tilletts are very cool
  • Get better hold of me on track
  • Allow me to add a harness crotch strap later
  • Get rid of the OEM seat rail and the slop in the driver runner.
  • Easy/quick to dry when car has been washed or I’ve been to Anglesey
  • Lose a bit of weight

Tillett do a range of seats applicable for a Lotus, some with compromise, some more road focussed, others more track/race focussed and the particular model I’ve gone for is the B6 Screamer XL.

In an Elise/Exige the higher sides make ingress/egress a little difficult (but far from impossible) but in a 2-Eleven I crane myself in from above, so these have no real downside in that regard.

Tillett make/sell padded inserts for these. I’ve given them a miss for now because that would just bring me back to soaking up a load of water when I wash the car, but depending on how I get on, they may feature later.

The B6 Screamer is FIA certified, not something I’m chasing for particularly but it’s reassuring to have.

There are a fair few carbon seat options out there, some of which are considerably lighter than even these… so knowing they’ve passed some sort of test is something I find comforting.

In terms of weight, obviously I should factor in the seat rails to that too - but I’ve gone for the Tillett EBS fixed rails for both sides. You can mount Tilletts onto OEM runners with the right combination of brackets, but I’m the only person who ever drives this and I don’t need to slide the seat back and forth for easy access as I would in an Exige, so seemed like a no brainer to save a bit of weight and get a properly fixed seat.
The total weight saving across both seats and rails is 4.6kg. The seats themselves are not THAT light for carbon, mainly because they’re part carbon and part GRP, but also I assume for the FIA stiffness tests.

Though fixed, the runners have a lot of combinations for front/back adjustment in addition to seat height and angle.

The quality of the seats themselves are fantastic, but all of the included hardware is just top notch too. Everything has been thought about, particularly with the access challenges of a Lotus chassis and the best effort has been made to make an awkward job just a little less awkward.

One of the my favourite bits are the aluminium bobbins in the seat which you bolt the seat rails too. The OEM seats always felt a bit flakey here (even though they’re fine), and had to try hard not to imagine them under the stress of a frontal impact but the Tillett ones just ooze strength.

Onto fitment, Tillett sent me out some instructions ahead of time which to be honest blew my mind a bit. There was a lot of text, a lot of pictures and even a few diagrams - but for some reason the words I could understand in isolation - but put them all together in a sentence and I just wanted to go to bed.

With the parts in front of me, initially things got worse! The diagrams were subtly different to what I actually had, presumably due to product evolution but the general gist of how to approach an installation was there, so I cracked on.

The main challenges are that the Elise chassis has a bunch of holes drilled in the floor to allow for various combinations of LHD, RHD and seat position. The cabin isn’t actually symmetrical and the passenger side gets less room to play with. This means the passenger holes are not “square” and allowances need to be made with the seat rail to accommodate this.

The passenger rails have ‘joggles’ to allow you to figure this out, but the general approach is:

  • Get the floor rails in
  • Bolt the side rails to the seat
  • Offer the seat into the car, noting how far off the alignment is between floor and side rails
  • Space out the side rails from the seat with the included nylon spacers until it all lines up

So lots of trial and error. The Guide does give you a recommended starting point, which I had to tweak properly as my transmission tunnel prevented me from using the recommended floor holes - but pretty soon I had the passenger seat in hand tight.

The passenger seat was probably in and out of the car 6 or 7 times to get this far, so I appreciated the lightweight nature of the seat… but was still a fair bit stiff the morning after! Due to the narrower nature of the passenger side, if going for the B6 Screamer XL you pretty much need the passenger seat as far back as it will possibly go to clear the transmission tunnel. I imagine this gets quite tight in an Elise/Exige with a harness bar.

I had to relocate my intercom slightly, but that’s worked out better because I can actually access the knobs now!

Onto the driver side, this promised to be easier because the floor holes are all square, you can reach them all from above (the passenger side had some very difficult to access fixings in the front left) and as advertised, it was much, much easier.

I had it out maybe 3-4 times to finetune the seating position but soon got happy with a leg length. The seats are quite a lot lower than the Lotus seats on their rails which gave me a slight cause for concern as my front right corner is already a bit of a blindspot in the 2-Eleven due to how high up the clam comes, but I wanted to persist with it as I envisioned some other benefits to sitting lower. I could always raise the seat after a test drive if it was really bad.

Next up, I took them all out again…

Something I’ve been stewing over since ordering these months ago was how battered the carbon finish would get from climbing in and out of the car, bashing harness buckles and HANS devices against them, and stonechips on the unoccupied passenger side.

I reached out to no fewer than 7 of the most local PPF dealers from the big franchises like XPEL and nobody was even bothered about having a conversation about it. The best I got was an offer for some FoC offcuts to have a go myself, then even they ghosted me on the follow up. I mostly got ignored, no returned calls etc - but the one place that did engage in conversation just admitted they’re only bothered about sticking precut templates onto supercars.

So if you’re a PPF dealer in Yorkshire, shame on you - because you probably ignored me. Really soured me against the PPF industry in general.

Next step was to buy a roll and have a go myself… but even that’s bloody hard! Seems like to buy a decent quantity of stuff you need to be a franchised dealer. Eventually I settled with Grafiguard Paint Protection Films PPF | Grafityp UK Limited. I’m not a PPF expert, but I’d never heard of them. It was the only way I could find a reasonable sized roll so was worth a punt.

I had no idea how well PPF would work with the various compound curves of the seat base, but I had enough material to experiment so I started big.

Made a template of the whole base, cut a piece to size, then of course had absolutely no chance getting it right. Ripples all over the place as the seat curved in every possible direction. Any attempt to gently ‘stretch’ the film round a curve resulted in it lifting up from the base of the bowl… no chance.

Went to bed a bit annoyed, but woke up with a plan to do some more smaller, achievable bits:

This would in theory protect from HANS device and road debris.

This went much better, I ended up cutting that template into three and got some great results.

Over the next couple of days I took the approach of just piecing together smaller, more achievable bits. Slowly learning what could, and couldn’t be done with my limited skillset. I eventually ended up with this:

I had enough left to do two large rectangles to go up the length of the back, either side of the spine - but I wanted to save enough to have a go at my rear wing too - so I’ll do those bits later, probably with a future roll.

The driver seat was the experimental one, and the passenger seat learned a few lessons as a result. Neither is perfect, but the passenger seat is more than acceptable. The driver side has a few bubbles in the main base area, but not bad enough for me to peel it off and go again. I’d rather save the film and see how it weathers the next few weeks.

I could definitely make all of the templates better now that I know my tactic for coverage, and at some stage this will all get done again and will be significantly better, but I’m very happy with what I managed. Very difficult to see the PPF and the join lines etc, especially with the carbon weave backdrop.

It’s hard to photograph, which is a good thing!

I had a trackday evening coming up, so would be an idea few hours to test out the seating position, but I did fancy some road mileage first just so I could get it somewhere close. TBC.

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I’ve not forgotten about my brakes, just been a bit distracted with my new bling!

Dave @ SL is helping me put a plan together for this, but yes we’re going big.

For now, I’ve got some like for like 288mm discs slapped back on just to get me through Donny tomorrow. That buys us a bit of time, then hopefully before Spa we’ll get the final setup sorted out.

I’m currently on 2 pots up front and sliders at the rear, but that may not be for long…

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What is the view in n 4pots for the 211? Overbraked?

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It’s hard to get a fair opinion on it. Those who have four pots say they’re good, those who are still on two pots say they’re not, etc etc.

From my personal findings I’m able to regularly lock up the front calipers on my car, so the first instinct is to say it’s already tyre limited and that I don’t need any bigger calipers or pads.

But then you consider the whole puzzle, moving 2-pots to the rear with a handbrake caliper, and putting 4-pots up front and then you essentially move some bias rewards, which may mean that I gain more tolerance before locking the fronts. Add to that better heat dissipation and the fact I can always go for a ‘milder’ pad, it seems like it could be viable.

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With the seats in, I had sat for many minutes making brum brum noises in the garage checking and finetuning the driver position but it was time for a test drive.

Summer evenings are an untapped treasure when you’ve got a toddler, bed by 19:30, on the road by 19:31, gets dark around 22:00. Bob on.

I met up with an old friend, who was also out on a shakedown run ahead of Donington Park this week.

Was great to see my old Exige out in the wild again, had the pleasure of following it for a fair few miles and they really are a good looking car on the move.

I decided to go sans helmet because the weather was lovely, I wanted to see how a lower seating position influenced ride comfort and I suppose I just wanted a good exfoliation:

This all worked great, until following another car on sticky tyres… I got quite a peppering, but avoided any major damage!

Initial impressions on the seating position were really strong. The only concern I had was with the seat height further robbing me of visibility down near the front wheels, and finding apexes on track was more down to guesswork than vision.

What I found though was that I was now able to see through the aero screen to see the point of the road down near my front corners, whereas previously I was looking down through it, which heavily distorted what I could see and essentially turned the aero screen into a massive blind spot. The net result, was I felt like I could see better down there.

As hoped/expected, the open air ride quality was fantastic. With noise cancelling earphones in I could quite happily sit at NSL without any real discomfort. As an experiment I had some reference points for what I could see in my previous seating position (the small body panels for brake fluid access for example) so when I stretched my neck up to get those into my eyeline, the ride comfort degraded exponentially.

Realistically my mileage without a helmet on is going to be few and far between, but happy that I’ve made this better for when I do want to enjoy it.

We meandered up through Eastish/Northish Yorkshire and eventually found Malton at which point Jamie had to turn around and head home. Light was fading, but I wasn’t far away from one of my favourite Yorkshire roads so I pushed on to get to Fylingdales just in time for the sun to fade.

It’s a belting road, usually spent sat in nose to tail bank holiday traffic trying to get into Whitby but there was only one other car sharing it with me that night… a Police Car.

I enjoyed the sunset, swapped my shaded lenses in my ballistic goggles for clear, then came home the boring way.

Clocked 3 hours of solid driving and had no desire to change the seating position at all. Harness waist strap got a slight adjustment, but that was about it.

I’d love to say I completed the drive with no trace of back ache from the seats, but my back was knackered before I even set off (probably from constantly lifting the seats in and out…) but at least the long drive in the Tilletts didn’t make it worse!

Car got a well needed wash the following morning, then into the trailer for Donny.

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What about brake feel? Wont larger pots offer slightly less feel without a master cylinder servo mod?