Project Elise – A Proper Introduction

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With the trim panel back on the roll bar is barely visible. Here you can see Lotus was OK with being able to see the roll bar rather than fully hide it. This speaks to the fact that they compromised VERY little to build this car. You can also see our Carbon Fiber rear speaker delete panels from Really Light Stuff.

With the chassis covered we move to the suspension. At the front of the car the Elise uses an unequal length a arm suspension that is supported by Eibach springs and controlled by Bilstein dampers, with roll being limited by an anti-sway bar. Also in the front is the solidly mounted mechanical steering rack that is roughly 2.8 turns lock to lock. Despite having manual steering the Elise input is light, direct, and feedback borders on telepathic.

Lots to see here… The inverted Bilstein dampers, the Eibach springs, the unequal length upper and lower control arms, plenty of goodness… The red ooze in the picture is the glue that bonds the chassis pieces together.

Another view of the front suspension. In this picture you can see the manual steering rack. It is an amazingly simple manual rack that fits in to a channel in the extruded aluminum chassis. Removal is simple and involves the removal of 7 nuts/bolts. You can also see gusseting of the upper A arm and more red goo!

 The rear of the car also uses an unequal length A arm design with the Eibach/Bilstein coilover combo and features an adjustable toe link to keep everything in alignment. The rear toe links on the Elise have been a cause of great controversy as there have been numerous reported failures of the inner rear toe link. The theory that has been proposed is that the factory galvanizing on the threads is known to compress over time and as such the bolts fall out of torque specification, thus introducing loading on the end that it was not designed for. This also appears to mainly be an issue on cars being tracked with R compound tires, however a few failures have been reported on the street. This is an area that we will certainly be addressing in a future installment as we want a bulletproof track experience.

Here you can see the rear suspension assembly and you guessed it… more red goo! The keen eye will also  notice the rear frame section bolting to the aluminum chassis.

 While there are different suspension options they all utilize a variation of this combination in a coil over configuration. The most common offerings were the touring, sport, and track packages. The touring pack offers some creature comforts as well as the most compliant suspension of the bunch. The sport pack features lightweight forged wheels as well as a more aggressive spring rate and damper, the track pack features adjustable dampers, upgraded rear toe links as well as a toe link brace.

Here you can plainly see the rear toe link. The inner joint is the failure prone piece. We will be sure to address this!

For our project we chose a touring model as we have plans to upgrade the suspension, wheels, and brakes with aftermarket bits. We also wanted power windows and leather seats and those are part of the touring pack. Our search landed us with an early production 2005 Lotus Elise. Our car has the touring package and hard top options and is Graphite Grey in color. It was an unmolested example and had just 10,800 miles on the odometer. Another reason for not wanting a track pack car was that it gave us more examples to choose from at a better price point. In addition the touring cars were less likely to have been tracked by the previous owner.

 Up front the base and touring cars without the sport or track pack use a 16 x 5.5″ cast aluminum wheel with a 31mm offset that weighs 15.2 lbs. Mounted to this is a 175/55/16 Yokohama Advan Neova AD07 in the front of the car. Out back the Wheel is a 17 x 7.5″ cast aluminum piece with a 38mm offset that weighs 21.05 lbs. The rear uses the same AD07 in a 225/45/17 size. The Sport and track pack cars featured lighter weight and wider Front and Rear wheels along with wider front tires. The wheels all use the common 4 x 100 bolt pattern.