Paris, October 1975: When the Lotus Esprit First Went on Show

The Paris motor show opens today, and Lotus is there with the Emira 420 Sport and the Eletre X, as we covered last week. It is a good moment to remember another Lotus debut at the same show. In October 1975 the production Esprit was unveiled at the Paris Salon. It would stay in production for 28 years.

From a show car to a Lotus

The Esprit began as an idea, not a Lotus project. Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign built a full-size silver concept and showed it on the Italdesign stand at the Turin show in November 1972. It became known as the Silver Car. The public reaction was strong enough that Colin Chapman approved further development, and the car was earmarked to replace the Europa.

Under Mike Kimberley, the engineers used a stretched version of the Europa Twin Cam’s backbone chassis and fitted the new Lotus 907 engine. The prototype appeared at Geneva in 1973. By the time the finished car reached Paris two years later, it had kept the sharp folded-paper lines of the original sketch remarkably well.

The car that went on show

The Esprit S1 (Type 79) was a classic Chapman layout. A steel backbone chassis carried a glass fibre body, with the engine mounted lengthways behind the cabin and driving the rear wheels. The 907 was a 1,973 cc twin-cam four with 16 valves, rated at 160 bhp in European trim. The car weighed around 900 kg.

Production started at Hethel in June 1976, and 718 S1s were built before the S2 arrived in 1978. Contemporary testers found it short of power next to some rivals, but its low weight and balance earned it a following. A year after production began, a white S1 drove off a jetty and became a submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me, which did more for its fame than any road test.

A long run

The Esprit kept evolving. The Turbo arrived in 1980, Peter Stevens reshaped the body in the late 1980s, and a twin-turbo V8 followed in 1996. The last car left the line on 20 February 2004. You can read more about it, and the other cars that defined the company, in our guide to famous Lotus cars.

Seeing one today

Esprits turn up regularly at club meets and classic shows, and there are good examples at many of the gatherings on our events page. If you are making the trip to the factory where they were built, our Hethel and Norfolk loop covers the roads around it. The line at Hethel now builds the Emira, the latest mid-engined Lotus to follow the path the Esprit laid out.

Sources: Lotus Esprit on Wikipedia, 50 years of the Lotus Esprit from Classic & Sports Car, and 1976 to 1980 Lotus Esprit S1 from Supercars.net.