Happy Taillight Tuesday!
My desire for an S2 Elise grows every day…
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Still posting on Tumblr in 2024. Tap in
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Lotus 340R
Lotus isn’t known for making cars bogged down by luxuries and gimmicks, but the featherweight open-wheel 340R makes the company’s driver’s cars seem like overly plush comfort cruisers by comparison.The Lotus 340R is an extreme and unusual machine, and two decades after its debut it’s still about as close to a kart as cars get. Based on the Lotus Elise, itself a spartan design dedicated to driving purity, the 340R ratcheted that ethos to another level, and is very much in line with Colin Chapman’s philosophies that moulded the manufacturer’s identity. Lacking fenders and a roof, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this car was intended purely for circuits, and while a weekend trackway is probably the best place to spot a 340R, they are road legal in Europe and the UK.
he example featured here ratchets up the car’s stats further still, achieving a claimed 192hp compared to the standard 177hp produced by the naturally aspirated 1.8-liter inline-four. The additional power is courtesy of the optional Sport Pack, which adds a Janspeed exhaust among other minor tweaks. This car is also one of only 43 lefthand-drive examples built from the scant total production run of 340 units (the car’s name was originally conceived as a reference to the targeted power to weight ratio—340hp per ton—but when that figure wasn’t attained in the production version, Lotus decided to keep the name and build the corresponding number of units instead).
The car was clearly intended for drivers in search of performance by way of lightness rather than power, but the 340R wasn’t a straight line slouch either, able to deliver the 0-60 sprint in less than 4.5 seconds, which was faster than some of the era’s purported supercars. And in the corners, hardly anything with a license plate bracket could touch this Lotus in its day, or ours for that matter.
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