Coachmakers’ Car Club’s Lotus factory and Classic Team Lotus visit

Thirteen Coachmakers’ Car Club (CCC) members including partners and friends, travelling from far and wide met at Dunston Hall in Stoke Holy Cross on Sunday 16th November for a splendid dinner and get together. We were then joined the following morning by another 14 CCC members at the Lotus factory for what was to be a most fantastic and memorable day. It started sunny, but being Norfolk, we saw most of the seasons in one day!

The visit was brilliantly organised by Liveryman Carl Elston, Executive Director at Lotus Cars Ltd (UK). After some warming coffee and look around the full range of cars Lotus makes including the Emira and the 2000 HP fully electric Evija Hypercar, we were introduced to department MD Matt Nice, Design Director Russell Carr and Head of Dynamics Gavan Kershaw, plus Head of PR Alistair Florence and Sheena Valentina (ex-RAF) who was leader the dynamics team looking after us for the day.

We were divided into two teams, not before a chance visitor, namely Clive Chapman (Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s son) who passed through and said hello. The first team were lucky enough to be first taken to the FIA rated Hethel test track, which is based on the original runway from the RAF base occupied by the US Air Force during WW2. I think most of us believed that we were to be driven as passengers around the track in the four Emira models, but when we learned we could take the cars out ourselves, you could see big grins around the briefing room. Very few of us wanted to be passengers. (We are a car club after all!).

After a couple of sighting laps with the professional driver instructors we were allowed to get behind the wheel and push these super-quick 400bhp Emiras as fast as we dared (or our lack of talent would allow!) around the famous Hethel track. These really are fantastic quality British supercars, and although all the traction control and other safety devices were switched on, some of us still managed to have a few twitchy moments!

There were a couple of amateur current and ex-racing drivers in our team, one of them behind me with my rear-view mirror full of a yellow Lotus driven by Liveryman Joe Ward, who as some of you may know, races a famous super saloon called “Baby Bertha,” so I did not feel quite so slow!

Next on the agenda was the tour of the state-of-the-art Emira manufacturing facility led by Carl. The factory is the most modern vehicle production plant in the UK with more than £500m investment made by parent company Geely. It was explained in recent history of the site, cars such as the Lotus Carlton, Vauxhall VX220, and the DeLorean have a place here, and it was also where Tesla was born and we were able to visit part of the factory where the original Tesla roadsters were made, before leaving the UK and moving to California. The manufacturing site is designed to maximise flexibility with automatic guided vehicles and robots a-plenty but keeping the high levels of craftmanship from the skilled and experienced operators for which Lotus is renowned.

Given the fluctuating nature of the supercar industry created by global politics and sudden unknowns such as the recent increase in tariffs exporting to the US, Lotus is doing a fantastic job of keeping on top of this with the modular production lines either increasing or reducing the overall output in a very short time.

Many of the components are produced in-house allowing a cost effective and full machine utilisation where possible, and to see the build process of these beautiful Emiras was a real treat. Probably the most impressive part was the quality assurance at each stage of build, resulting in almost a zero re-work rate.

Part of the tour included a quick visit to the Evija hall where there were some very special customised hypercars in production. An incredible engineering masterpiece and elegantly beautiful machine. It was certainly difficult to extract us out of there, I can assure you.

After a great lunch we were then treated to a tour of the Classic Team Lotus collection, just down the road in a bespoke building. This started with a quick view of the stunning collection of technical drawings and data for every Lotus Formula 1 and race car ever made, including race reports and timings of every race a Lotus has entered.

From there we passed through workshops where teams worked on customer cars, upstairs to be faced with an eye-watering collection of Lotus F1 cars that won the World Championships in 1963, 1965, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1973 and 1978. These cars were the actual cars driven by driver champions such as Ayrton Senna, Nigel Mansell, Mario Andretti, Emerson Fittipaldi, that won 74 World Championship Grand Prix races. We were treated to a fascinating talk by Classic Team Lotus photographer and author William Taylor and supported by Alistair Florence on each of the F1 cars, the first being raced in 1957.

The trophy cabinet was spectacular, and we were also shown a brown paper bag, under lock and key. This is believed to have the secret as to why Lotus is called Lotus, but nobody knows. The Chapman family has a plan to open it to recognise what would have been Hazel Chapman’s 100th birthday (co-founder of Lotus and Colin’s wife).

Sadly, the day was quickly over but not before we had a final gathering where we presented a CCC cheque for £800 to Carl Elston to be given to the East Anglia Air Ambulance, the chosen charity of Lotus as a small but grateful thank you for a wonderful day.

Assistant Nick Lyford presents a cheque to Liveryman Carl Elston

A huge thank you to Carl and his team for a day none of us will forget, especially those fabulous Emiras on the track. A very special day indeed with a very special British automotive icon.