The Wedge That Outlasted the Competition: A History of the Lotus Esprit

Colin Chapman had a problem in the early 1970s. The Lotus Europa, the car the Esprit was meant to replace, was aging and never particularly pretty to begin with. Chapman had also come to the conclusion that building lightweight stripped-down sports cars on a shoestring wasn’t going to keep the lights on. What Lotus needed was something that looked like it belonged next to a Ferrari or a Porsche in a showroom, not just on a lap chart. So Chapman went to Turin.

Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign had already made a name for itself by the early 1970s, and in 1972, Lotus commissioned the firm to style a new car on a modified Europa chassis. The result debuted at the Turin Motor Show that year as the Lotus M70 concept, shown alongside Italdesign’s own Boomerang, another exercise in flat planes and hard angles that made everything else in the room look like it was from a different decade. The M70 looked close enough to the car that eventually went on sale that you could mistake one for the other, but the road to production was long. The production-ready Esprit S1 was finally unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in October 1975, with assembly officially spinning up in June 1976 for the 1976 model year.