Lotus Esprit at 50: Hollywood's favourite car from Pretty Woman to James Bond

The Lotus Esprit’s gifted creator didn’t need massive horsepower to make it dance around its exotic rivals; just an F1 team leader’s mindset - and more than a little help from Q in British Intelligence to do his advertising for free. The Esprit was a giant killer and, because it was on sale for an astonishing 27 years, one of the longest-lived classic British cars of all time. When launched to the public back in the scorching summer of 1976, the 140mph two-seater cost around £8,000, with the ‘Final Edition’ selling for £60,000 in 2004. If you can persuade an owner today to part with one of the scarce early cars in fine condition, as much as £80,000 would have to change hands. Lotus founder Colin Chapman came up with the idea for the Esprit in 1971, after a chance meeting with a young Italian car stylist called Giorgetto Giugiaro. Chapman’s Norfolk-based company already made the Lotus Europa, one of the first affordable cars with an engine mounted in the middle of the car behind the driver – just like the single-seater Lotus cars that had given Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill their racing successes; during the 1960s and ‘70s. Lotus Grand Prix cars won 13 World Championships largely thanks to Chapman’s technical innovations. Now Giugiaro designed a startling, wedge-shaped body for the Europa’s replacement that made the car instantly futuristic. Pop-up headlights kept its dart-like profile missile-sharp. The prototype was revealed in 1972 and four years later it hit the road for real. It was a quantum leap in glamour and luxury over earlier Lotuses, and brought the marque global acclaim. But Chapman calculated he didn’t need the thirsty V8 or even V12 engines found in mid-engined Italian cars, and kept the modest 2-litre, four-cylinder engine from the Europa. However, his famous mantra was to “add lightness” to his cars, and so the Esprit had a sturdy backbone chassis like a steel spine and a very light plastic body. It weighed little more than 1000kg. Consequently, the car offered fantastic performance, with 0-62mph in 6.9sec, along with racing car-standard cornering and grip. Lotus’s build quality was not always the best, though; early Esprits had teething problems, including overheating and vibrations. Lotus also couldn’t afford to make everything bespoke for the Esprit, so lots of parts came from other cars, such as door handles from the Morris Marina and rear lights from the Rover 3500. It also couldn’t afford an expensive advertising campaign. But that was no problem, thanks to a tie-in with the James Bond producers that saw the Esprit star in the 1977 movie The Spy Who Loved Me. It might have been following in the wheel-tracks of the Aston Martin DB5 at first, but for a new generation of 007 fans, the Esprit became the most coveted car on earth… and also at sea. Because Lotus supplied three special Esprit mock-up models to be used as submarines in the movie, with the special effects brilliantly filmed at Pinewood Studios. For driving scenes shot on location, actor Roger Moore appears to be tackling twisty roads at breakneck speed, showing the Esprit’s limpet-like roadholding. Yet, secretly at the wheel was Lotus’s own chief development engineer and test driver Roger Becker, wearing a Moore-style wig, pressed into action as a free stuntman while he looked after the brilliant white car – one he’d helped to design. “It was seven weeks of shooting in Sardinia for about seven minutes of screen time,” he recalled. “The cast ended up calling me 006-and-a-half.” The Esprit was such a hit that another one, the new 152mph Esprit Turbo (for a while the fastest production car on sale), featured in the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only, crunching through the perfect snow of the Italian Alps, skis strapped to its roof. Over the years, Esprit went through numerous detail changes, as Lotus kept it at the cutting edge of supercar design. Throughout the 1990s, there were seven different styles of rear spoiler alone and, in 1996, Lotus fitted a 350bhp V8 engine in the car to rocket it into the 21st century at 175mph. There was also an Esprit resurgence at the cinema, as the cars appeared with co-stars in a slew of popular, fast-paced movies – Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman in 1990, Richard Grieco in If Looks Could Kill in 1991, and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct in 1990. None of these, though, could boast an Esprit with a periscope or on-board radar and missiles, like Bond’s 1977 version, kitted out, secretly, by MI6. When Lotus finally decided to retire the Esprit in 2004, some 10,500 examples had been sold, with only 150 sold annually towards the end, each one taking 570 manhours to hand-build by 21 dedicated staff. When, in the Esprit’s later life, Lotus launched its X180R racing Esprit in the USA in 1990, five of the $134,000 cars were snapped up by Microsoft executives. Actor Paul Newman raced one too. Giorgetto Giugiaro, having come to worldwide attention for the Esprit, went on to design several multi-million-selling family cars, including the Volkswagen Golf and Fiat Uno. And, indeed, it was on sale so long that the Esprit spanned several generations of celebrity owners, starting with Noel Edmonds and Mark Thatcher and culminating with Nicolas Cage, chef Gary Rhodes and rugby star Victor Obogu. Lotus' legacy Today’s director of design at Lotus, Russell Carr, has been in charge of shaping the company’s sports and GT cars for 36 years, including the Elise and current Evija and Emira. Yet he still rates the Esprit – from an era long before he was involved – as one of the most significant Lotuses of all. He says: “The Esprit is incredibly important to Lotus and is undoubtedly one of our iconic road cars. You don’t have to be a Lotus aficionado, or even a petrolhead, to be able to recognise the Esprit. It became one of the poster cars for the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s because it fundamentally ticked all the boxes required to make a car special. It drove fantastically and had an exotic aura. “Unlike other supercars of the day, it somehow seemed attainable and could occasionally be seen on the streets of suburban England. From a design perspective, the car was significant because it captured the zeitgeist of the moment with its wedge design theme. I think the appeal of its design has endured because it has a memorable theme – a purity of surface and great proportions.” Russell also rates the Esprit’s interior, where the driver almost lies down flat to take the steering wheel. He says: “It was game-changing both in terms of form and the crazy tartan textiles used. It perfectly fulfilled Chapman’s desire to create products that were different, with trend-setting design and superb driving dynamics – cars that were light and efficient.” Working on later versions of the car himself, such as the Sport 300, S4 and V8 models, he adds: “Like every schoolboy of my age, I had fallen in love with the car when it was launched and so to be able to join Lotus and meet the people who’d created the original car was amazing.”