The Shape Children Draw

I was at a colleague's house for their kid's sixth birthday, which at that age means a lot of cake and a table covered in paper and crayons. At some point one of the mothers asked the children if they could all draw a car.

About 80 percent of them drew the same car.

Pointed or slanted front end. Very low to the ground. Flat top. Some kind of wing at the back. Six-year-olds, working independently at a sticky table in a kitchen in the twenty-first century, produced a room full of Lotus Esprits.

Now, before anybody writes in: yes, they are six, and yes, they absolutely looked at each other's paper. That is what six-year-olds do. But that only moves the question rather than answering it, because at least one of them had to draw it first, and none of them has ever seen one.

Seeing a Lotus in traffic is rare. Seeing a 30-year-old Esprit in traffic is a genuine event, the automotive equivalent of finding a diamond in a bucket of ice on your first reach. For a six-year-old to have that shape stored somewhere behind their eyes, ready to come out of a crayon, is like doing the ice-bucket trick blindfolded.

OneWhy they all knew

Because shapes were our first language and we never really left them.

There were figures on a cave wall at Lascaux long before there was grammar. Egypt built an entire written language out of pictures. Chinese characters still carry meaning in their strokes, shifting with whatever sits before or after them. We eventually refined all of it into letters and numbers, which feels like progress right up until you notice that letters are also just shapes we agreed on. And then, at the absolute peak of our technological sophistication, having invented the pocket supercomputer and the global network, we collectively decided that typing words was too slow and went back to sending each other tiny pictures. Emoji are hieroglyphics with a marketing department.

Shapes get into people. They skip the part of the brain that has to be taught something and lodge in the part that simply knows. That is unremarkable when the shape is a circle or an arrow or a heart. It is a much stranger achievement when the shape is one specific car, drawn by one specific man, in one specific year, for a company that managed fewer than 11,000 of them across 28 years.

So the shape got out. It escaped the car and became the idea of the car. The wedge is not a Lotus design any more; it is what "fast" looks like, permanently, to people who were not alive when it was drawn. Giorgetto Giugiaro folded a piece of paper in 1972, Lotus showed it in Paris in October 1975 as the Esprit, and half a century later a child who has never heard the word Giugiaro will draw it for you on request.

That is the highest compliment any designer has ever been paid, and nobody was there to collect it.

TwoThree cars, and why not the rest

You cannot write about "the Esprit" because there is no such thing. There are 28 years of Esprits, each one defining the sports car for whatever five-year window it lived in, each one straining to keep hold of Colin Chapman's "simplify, then add lightness" while the market kept demanding air conditioning and a stereo and a bit more power.

So we are going to do three. All from the last generation, all built on the same bonded steel backbone, all wearing more or less the same body, and all completely different cars.

And now the argument I can hear you starting

Somebody is already typing about the V8 GT. And the V8 SE. And the Sport 350. And the GT3, which is a wonderful car that half the people who have driven every Esprit will tell you is quietly the best of the lot.

They are all superb and they all belong in the family. They are not here for a simple reason: they are not separate arguments, they are refinements of these three. The V8 GT and V8 SE are the 1998 split of the V8 into a lighter one and a plusher one, which makes them trim levels with strong opinions. The Sport 350 of 1999 is the V8 given the Sport 300 treatment, which makes it a sequel. The GT3 is the two-liter budget entry, which makes it a different price bracket doing a different job.

The Sport 300, the S4S and the V8 are three genuinely distinct philosophies of what a late Esprit should be, and Lotus sold all three at once. That is the story. Everything else is a variation on one of them.

Sport 300, 1992

S4S, 1994

V8, 1996

One shell, three arguments. The Sport 300 wears bolted-on arches over a 50 mm wider rear track and a hoop wing mounted to the tailgate. The S4S keeps the bodywork and drops the racer's chassis. The V8 trades the hoop for an integrated lip and hides a completely different engine behind the same glass. Four years and 48 horsepower separate the top car from the bottom one, and the outline barely moved.

ThreeWhere it all actually came from

Here is the thing that surprises people: this whole run of cars exists because of America, and because of a racing driver with a good idea.

In 1990 the SCCA opened its professional production-based series to non-Chevrolet machinery and renamed it World Challenge. Doc Bundy pitched Lotus on entering, as a way of proving the Esprit against its peers in the market that mattered most. Lotus said yes, and built the Type 105.

They turned up at Sears Point with 14 laps of testing behind them. The car qualified fifth and won.

Across that first season Bundy and Scott Lagasse took six poles and four wins from eight races, and Bundy would have taken the championship if he had not crashed at Dallas. Lotus finished second in the manufacturers' standings, behind the sheer weight of Corvette numbers but ahead of Porsche, Mazda and Nissan. Every driver in the top nine other than the two Lotus men was in a Corvette.

To celebrate that, and rather more importantly to homologate the aerodynamic parts it wanted for the following season, Lotus built a handful of road-going Esprits that were nearly identical to the race cars — adding back only the minimum required to register one: sport seats, glass windows, heating, air conditioning, a radio, a galvanized chassis. Lotus built 20 of them. That is the X180R, and it is the grandfather of everything that follows.

So when the Sport 300 arrived, it was not a hot-rodded road car pretending to have a racing pedigree. Autocar put it plainly in August 1993: underneath, this was not a modified S4 at all, but a derivative of the X180R racer that had been competing in American SCCA and IMSA supercar racing for three years.

Lotus sales manager Scott Walker, interviewed for the Crowood marque history of the Esprit, describes it as a road-going replica of the 1991 X180R race car. Which is about as close as a manufacturer ever gets to admitting they sold you a race car with a number plate on it.

FourThe Sport 300: it turns before you turn it

Start with the numbers, because they are absurd for a four-cylinder car from a company that was, at the time, permanently about six weeks from a cash crisis.

2.2 liters. Four cylinders. A hybrid Garrett T3/T4 turbocharger, hand-finished inlet ports, larger inlet valves, a more efficient chargecooler, recalibrated GM-Lotus engine management, a bit more boost and a diet of 98-octane unleaded. Output: 302 bhp at 6,400 rpm and 287 lb ft at 4,400.

That is 139 bhp per liter. In 1992. From a production engine. For scale, the Ford Cosworth two-liter — the benchmark hot four of the period, the engine in the car everybody's older brother had a poster of — was making somewhere between 204 and 220 bhp at the same moment.

What Lotus actually did to it

The body is the work of Julian Thomson, then Lotus's chief stylist and later head of design at Jaguar, who took an S4 shell and added a new front air dam with integral brake cooling ducts, the extended arches and that hoop wing. It was shown as a concept at the Birmingham motor show in 1992 before anybody could buy one.

Everybody looks at the arches, and fair enough, because they are magnificent. But they are not styling. The rear track was widened by 50 mm, and the arches exist because the wheels no longer fit under the old ones. Form following function, visible from across a parking lot.

The bodywork itself was thinner composite — Lotus called it modified composite material — and the Sport 300's panels came in around 35 kg (77 lb) lighter than the S4's. Composites shaved something like 80 kg (176 lb) off the S4's 1,366 kg (3,012 lb), and stripping out the air conditioning, the audio, the digital clock, the map pockets and the under-carpet sound deadening did the rest. The result stood on the scales at 1,243 kg (2,738 lb). An S4 was 123 kg (271 lb) heavier. An S4S would be 217 kg (478 lb) heavier.

Underneath, the gear-lever access hole was modified, the front crossmember and the chassis spine were stiffened, the sunroof aperture was replaced with a bonded-in panel, an engine-bay cross-brace was added over the motor, and competition roll-cage mounts were fitted as standard. The suspension kept the S4's architecture — double wishbones front, transverse links and trailing arms rear — but gained stiffer springs and dampers, revised geometry, modified hub carriers and an adjustable top link at the rear.

Then the good bit. Behind five-spoke OZ three-piece split-rim wheels sit 327 mm ventilated discs at the front and 280 mm at the rear, gripped by four-piston AP Racing calipers with 31.75 mm pistons — the same items the X180R race car used. The handbrake needed a separate independently-mounted Brembo caliper, because the AP racing setup has no interest in holding a car still on a hill.

And the tires. 245/45 ZR16 Goodyear GS-C at the front on 8.5-inch rims; 315/35 ZR17 at the back on 10.5-inch rims. 315 millimeters of rear tire, on a car weighing less than a modern Golf. Scott Walker's line about it, in the Crowood book, is that with 315-section Goodyears on the back it will never fall off the planet, and having looked at the contact patch I am inclined to agree.

How it drives, according to the people who drove it

Autocar's tester in 1993 got straight to the steering, which on this car is power-assisted but geared at 3.1 turns lock to lock through a tiny Nardi wheel, and described a stream of uncorrupted road information arriving at the fingertips — including, he claimed, awareness of a pebble picked up by the front left tire several miles earlier. Which is the kind of thing motoring writers say, except that twenty years later Evo's Jethro Bovingdon drove one at Hethel and reached for almost the same vocabulary: incredible feel, a nice weightiness around the straight-ahead, and the sense of front wheels leaned in on negative camber.

Both of them describe the same car. Twenty years apart. That does not happen very often.

That last one deserves attention rather than dismissal, because Frankel then explains exactly why the car is in his book anyway: handling. His argument is that Lotus has spent its entire existence building cars riddled with faults, some great, most good, a few genuinely poor, and that the single thread running through every last one of them is that they are among the best-handling cars in the world. He calls the Sport 300 a flawed diamond, and means it as praise.

He also says something about its steering that I have never seen anyone say about any other car without embarrassment, which is that it might be the finest power-assisted system ever created — ideal in weight, response, precision, gearing and feel, and unsurpassed at delivering the feedback you want without the kickback you don't.

The one number that explains the whole car

Look at that chart for a moment, because it is the Sport 300 in miniature.

Leave it in fifth and ask for 50 to 70 mph and it takes 7.4 seconds, which is sleepy. Leave it in fourth for 30 to 50 and it takes 8.0 seconds, which is worse. Autocar's tester noted that on paper this makes the car look positively lazy.

Then drop it into third and second, and the same increments take 1.9 and 2.7 seconds. Autocar's comparison for that was a Dodge Viper.

Same car. Same road. Same afternoon. The entire difference is whether you were paying attention to the rev counter. Boost starts arriving around 3,000 rpm and genuinely hits its stride at 5,000, so the powerband is narrow and the S4's gear ratios were carried over unchanged. Get it right and there is one enormous wave to ride. Get it wrong and you are a man in a very expensive car being overtaken by a diesel estate.

This is the thing people mean when they say a Sport 300 is hard. Not uncomfortable — we will get to that — but demanding. It requires you to be somewhere specific in the rev range, in the right gear, having planned two corners ahead. In exchange it gives you a chassis that turns in before you have consciously decided to turn, and a limited-slip differential — the only one of our three cars to have one — that locks up on the exit and lets the rear Goodyears smear progressively across the road while you hold it there on the throttle.

Point it and it goes. It turns before you make it turn. That is not poetry, it is a description of what a 50 mm wider rear track, a cross-braced chassis and a limited-slip differential actually feel like.

The thing nobody expects

It rides well.

Genuinely. Autocar went out of its way to say the Sport 300 avoided the trap of the rock-hard ride that had caught out the Porsche Carrera RS Lightweight, and pointed out that you could still order air conditioning for £1,495 (about $2,245) and a CD player for £820 (about $1,230). Frankel, having spent a page complaining about the ventilation, describes the ride quality as soft and comfortable rather than firm and unyielding.

A road-legal race car with roll-cage mounts and a stripped interior that rides better than a Porsche RS. Of course it does. It is a Lotus.

And then Chamberlain took two of them to Le Mans

Team Lotus was, in 1993, in a condition best described as circling the drain. The Formula 1 operation that had won six constructors' championships was two years from folding. So when the Le Mans organizers revived a GT category, somebody at Hethel looked at the Sport 300, looked at the balance sheet, and decided that the cheapest available piece of good news was a run at the Sarthe.

The job went to Hugh Chamberlain, whose team had won the FIA Cup for Teams the previous season and knew exactly what a 24-hour race does to a car. Lotus Sport and Chamberlain Engineering co-developed two works Esprits, and what they built was recognizably the road car with the volume turned up: 18-inch wheels, beefed-up bodywork, specially fabricated suspension, unassisted steering, and the 2.2-liter four wound out to close to 400 bhp on a single Garrett turbo. Green and yellow, because of course they were.

1993 24 Hours of Le Mans, June 19–20, run in hot sunshine. The driver line-ups and the 92-lap figure are corroborated across sources; the 162-lap figure and the No. 44 grid slot of 39th come from a single enthusiast record and want checking against an official classification before publication.

Here is the part that is genuinely interesting, and it is an engineering story rather than a racing one. The cars did not break while they were racing. They broke while they were standing still.

At speed, air went through the radiators and everything stayed within itself. But an Esprit is a mid-engined car with a turbocharger sitting in a tight, hot, largely sealed box behind the cabin, and every time one of those cars came in for tires and a driver change, that box had no airflow through it at all. Heat soaked out of the exhaust and the turbine into everything nearby, and it did that for the length of a pit stop, and then the car went back out and was asked to make 400 bhp again. Do that enough times in one afternoon and the head gasket gives up. Autocar's phrasing was that heat soak fried the gaskets while the cars were pitting, and that is exactly what happened.

Both cars went out. Neither one was beaten by another car.

Lotus and Chamberlain came back in 1994, in the GT2 class, and retired again. The partnership was not a waste, though. Chamberlain took the Esprit to a class title in the BRDC National Sports GT Challenge that same year with Thorkild Thyrring driving, and ran the car in BPR Global GT Series rounds before Lotus took the program in-house for 1995.

One correction while we are here, because it circulates. Evo's group test describes the Sport 300 as a homologation special for the Esprit GT1 that raced at Le Mans in 1993. The Esprit GT1 is a different and later machine — it was unveiled at Paul Ricard in March 1996 with the still-secret V8 under its engine cover, and Lotus entered it at Le Mans that year. The 1993 and 1994 cars were Chamberlain-run Sport 300s with the four-cylinder engine. Same circuit, same idea, three years apart.

FiveThe S4S: the one that reads the room

In November 1994, Lotus did something commercially obvious and emotionally underrated. It took the Sport 300's engine, put it in a car with the S4's suspension and the S4's interior, wrapped it in the Sport 300's bodywork, and charged £12,000 less.

Lotus's own line was that the S4S would drive like a 300 and ride like an S4. That is marketing, and it is also very nearly true, and the gap between those two statements is the most interesting thing about this car.

Read those two panels again

The S4S is 217 kilograms heavier than the Sport 300. It has two fewer horsepower. It has no limited-slip differential, a softer chassis, standard S4 suspension settings, an interior full of leather and burr walnut, and a great glass sunroof that Motor Sport's tester blamed for a set of rattles.

And it got to 60 mph a tenth quicker, and to 100 mph three tenths quicker.

Now, the honest caveat first, because this is exactly the sort of comparison that gets repeated until it becomes a fact. These are different magazines, in different years, on different days, with different tires and different air. Autocar even flagged that its Sport 300 felt slower than its power-to-weight had any right to be, blamed suspected fuel starvation, and reported that Lotus reckoned an uprated fuel pump would sort it. Read the 4.7 as one car on one afternoon.

But even with all of that written down, the point survives, and it survives because of where the power lives rather than how much of it there is.

The Sport 300 makes 287 lb ft at 4,400 rpm and needs to be kept above 5,000 to feel like itself. The S4S makes 290 lb ft at 3,600 rpm, and 80 percent of that maximum is available anywhere from 2,500 rpm upward. Its peak power arrives 600 rpm higher up, at 7,000, so it revs further as well.

Which is to say: the S4S has a wider, flatter, friendlier torque curve than the car it is a cheaper copy of. On a track with a professional driver and a clear head, that is worth nothing. On a real road, in real traffic, with a junction coming up and a lorry to pass, it is worth an enormous amount.

What it gave up, in detail

Motor Sport's tester was not soft on it. He noted that Lotus was treading a dangerously fine line, that the S4S had suspension closer to the standard car but the fatter, less compromising rubber of the racer, and that the two do not always agree. Even at low speeds on decent surfaces, the suspension and tires rumbled and thumped. On British B-roads the verdict was blunt: you have to love this kind of car already, or you will come to hate it very quickly.

He also found the cabin noise ferocious, the parking near-impossible thanks to thick A-pillars and that rear wing, the pedals offset enough to require ballet, no seat or steering wheel adjustment whatsoever, and a fuel-hose-thin margin of space for anybody over about five foot ten. His six-foot-four photographer, he reports, complained.

And then he wrote the sentence that this entire article is quietly built around.

He was comparing it against the whole British field and against a Ferrari that, as he pointed out, would not leave you much change from £90,000 (about $142,100) at its cheapest. The S4S was £52,995, or about $83,700.

Why it works, in one paragraph

Because the wet. Motor Sport's test ran in foul conditions and the writer kept circling back to the same astonishment: a car with this much power has no business going full throttle in the wet with nothing worse than a bit of wheel tramp off the line. His photographer, watching it happen, asked why anybody needs four-wheel drive if grip like this is available in the rain.

That is a mid-engined car with a low polar moment, enormous rear tires, no differential locking anything up unexpectedly, and a chassis calibrated by people who had spent 30 years making Lotuses ride properly. It turns in without understeer, rolls almost not at all, and lets you power out earlier than you have any right to. When it does eventually let go — and Motor Sport is honest that it goes in a flash, because that is what a low polar moment buys you — it hands the car back to you at angles that make a grown adult consider going racing again.

The Sport 300 is a figure skater: astonishing, disciplined, and it wants a specific surface and a specific temperature. The S4S is a dancer. Put on any record you like and it will find the beat.

The bits that are still a Lotus

The gearbox is a Renault-derived five-speed transaxle, the same unit that served the Alpine A610. Every Esprit ever built had five forward gears — the early cars took a Citroen-derived box, everything from 1988 onward took the Renault, and the V8 kept it. There was never a six-speed Esprit. And it is not a joy. Motor Sport called it neither quick nor precise next to a Honda NSX's. Evo's Bovingdon, two decades later, wished aloud that the S4S shifted as sweetly as a 1976 S1.

The interior, in Bovingdon's careful phrasing, is very "handmade." Motor Sport wondered aloud what burr walnut was doing in a supposedly high-tech nineties sports car, which is a fair question that Lotus never answered.

And the brakes divide people entirely. Motor Sport found a dead zone at the top of the pedal travel and called it the nearest thing to a weakness in the car. Bovingdon, driving a good private example at Hethel, found the pedal almost rock-solid with short decisive travel, and wondered whether he had got hold of a freak. Both are probably right, twenty years apart, about cars that have been maintained very differently.

SixThe V8: the engine Lotus waited sixteen years to build

Sixteen years is not a figure picked for effect. Evo noticed that the 1980 Essex Turbo already carried a modified chassis with improved rear suspension, laid out to accommodate a V8 that was already in development. Lotus spent the whole of the eighties and half the nineties knowing exactly what this car needed and being unable to afford it.

Then, finally, it could.

On November 1, 1993, a hand-picked team at Hethel was given twenty-seven months to create, design and build a completely new V8 engine for a world-beating supercar. No carry-over, clean sheet, under former Ford engineers John Owen and Hugh Kemp, Kemp then director of powertrains at Lotus Engineering.

27 months. To do an engine. From nothing. At a company that had been sold twice in a decade.

They did it. In March 1996 the Esprit GT1 race car was shown at Paul Ricard with the still-secret V8 hidden under its engine cover, and four days later the road car broke cover at Geneva. Type 918: all-aluminum, 90 degrees, 3,506 cc, flat-plane crank, four overhead camshafts, 32 valves, two Allied Signal T25 water-cooled turbochargers. The first entirely new production engine Lotus had built since the Type 907 of 1972.

The good part first, because it is very good

0–60 mph in 4.1 seconds. 0–100 in 10.2. A standing quarter in 12.7 at 112 mph. 0.94 g on the skidpad. And 175 mph flat out, independently verified rather than claimed.

And here is the number that makes people sit up. A 1997 Porsche 911 Turbo was comfortably north of $100,000 in the United States, and an F355 sat roughly $30,000 above the Lotus. Those two figures come from secondary sources rather than a period price list, so treat them as the shape of the gap rather than the width of it. The Esprit V8's own number is solid: $79,945, and it was quicker than both of them to 60 and to 100.

It was also lighter than either, at 1,391 kg (3,067 lb) against roughly 1,500 kg (3,307 lb) for the 993 Turbo and 1,533 kg (3,380 lb) for an F355 Spider. On a road with corners in it, physics was on Norfolk's side.

The bad part, because there is one

Lotus's own published specification for the Type 918 lists four states of tune: naturally aspirated at 280 bhp, turbocharged at 350, intercooled at 420, and motorsport at 536. The Esprit got the 350 bhp version, with no chargecooler at all.

The story everybody tells is that the engine was a 500 bhp unit strangled down to 350 to protect a Renault transaxle that could not cope. You will find that claim on forums, in magazine retrospectives and, when we checked, in an AI search summary. It is repeated everywhere and sourced almost nowhere.

What is verifiable is more useful. The gearbox genuinely was a Renault-derived transaxle carried over from the four-cylinder cars. It genuinely was the weak point. And Lotus's own engine literature genuinely does show the same architecture rated at 420 bhp with an intercooler and 536 bhp in race trim. Whether the transmission was the specific reason for the 350 bhp road-car figure is folklore. That the engine had substantially more in it is documented fact.

How it feels, which is different from how it goes

The V8 is the grand tourer of the three and it is not close. Torque arrives as an unrelenting linear surge beyond 4,000 rpm rather than a hit, which makes it the only Esprit here you could genuinely cover 500 miles in without arriving furious. It has the best interior of the three — four VDO dials, an LCD odometer, digital rev counter, hand-finished leather sports seats, and from 1998 a properly redesigned facia with a smaller binnacle and a narrower center tunnel. It has the smallest wings and the cleanest lines, with those little aerofoils ahead of the front wheels and chrome-tipped pipes either side of a matt black blade.

Colin Goodwin drove a 2002 car down the same Sussex A-road he had delivered that yellow Sport 300 along nine years earlier, and described exactly the right thing about it: a short delay while the two turbines spin up, then a bolt of torque big enough that you find yourself grabbing higher gears in quick succession. His point was not that the V8 is violent. It is that this kind of accessible mid-range takes the risk out of overtaking on a real road, which is a grand tourer's virtue rather than a sports car's.

He was also blunt about what Lotus had got wrong in the cars before it. Overdoing the cabin, he reckoned, had been a mistake — trying to make a palpably purposeful sports car feel like a luxury saloon. Which is, word for word and from a completely different direction, the same complaint Motor Sport had filed about the burr walnut in the S4S seven years earlier.

It also sounds, to my ears and to a great many other people's, better than anything else Lotus has ever put in a road car. A flat-plane crank V8 with two small turbos on it does not sound like a Ferrari and does not try to. It sounds like a piece of aerospace equipment doing something slightly illegal.

But Evo's Hethel test of the closely related Sport 350 found what the four-cylinder cars do not have. Where the other Esprits felt controlled and measured through transitions, the V8 car was working visibly harder to contain the mass sitting above and behind the driver's shoulders — roll oversteer eroding turn-in accuracy, a period of limbo after you commit, and a throttle abrupt enough to make linking corners awkward. Bovingdon called it the most intimidating car of the six and, tellingly, the one least in control of its own weight.

The Sport 300 is a figure skater and the S4S is a dancer. The V8 is a long-distance runner with a personal best nobody else in the family can touch, and a turning circle to match.

The one that came after, briefly

The V8 GT arrived at the very end of 1997, released that November, with Lotus stating that the point was to make the V8's performance accessible to more drivers by minimizing the detail specification without hurting the driving. Just over 200 were built across five years, which made it the second-largest production variant of the V8 line. In 1998 an AP Racing twin-plate low-inertia clutch and a re-engineered gearbox selector went in, which addressed at least some of what Walker had complained about, and a lightweight Kelsey-Hayes ABS system improved stability under heavy braking.

And the brakes, which had been the one area where every reviewer since 1976 had found something to complain about, were finally sorted. By 2002 the Esprit ran two-piece 320 mm discs with four-pot calipers at the front and two-pot at the rear. Goodwin's verdict on them is the shortest possible summary of a 26-year engineering argument: not now. You could finally be confident the car would shed speed as impressively as it gathered it, even on a track day.

The engine management, incidentally, came from EFI Technology in Bologna rather than from Delco, the supplier belonging to Lotus's former owners at General Motors. Under Romano Artioli's ownership, Lotus found common ground with Bugatti and deployed software from a Bugatti V12 program — one primary injector per cylinder, a secondary injection feed on each bank, ignition coils triggered from a crankshaft position sensor. There is a sentence in there I want engraved somewhere: a British sports car, owned by an Italian, running Bugatti software, built in Norfolk, sold in Los Angeles.

SevenHead to head, and against the world

Enough character study. Put them on a table.

Green marks the best figure in each row. Performance numbers come from three different magazines in three different years, so cross-column comparisons are indicative rather than instrumented.

Now the neighbors

An Esprit never existed in isolation. It was always the strange British thing parked between the Germans and the Italians, undercutting both and being taken less seriously than either.

Esprit V8 and both Ferraris tested by Car and Driver; Sport 300 by Autocar; S4S by Motor Sport; 993 Turbo figures are published manufacturer and reference data rather than a single magazine test. Dashes are figures that could not be verified from a comparable source, and are left blank rather than guessed.

Read that table slowly, because there is something quietly outrageous in it.

The Sport 300 weighs 1,243 kg (2,738 lb). The Ferrari it was measured against weighs 1,533 kg (3,380 lb). That is a 290 kg (642 lb) difference — roughly four adult passengers — and the Lotus is doing it with half the cylinders and 73 fewer horsepower, and still arriving at 60 mph a tenth of a second sooner.

And the V8 out-accelerates a 993 Turbo, an F355 Berlinetta and an F355 Spider, from a list price tens of thousands of dollars below either of them.

None of which mattered, commercially, at all. Lotus sold 1,237 V8 Esprits in eight years. Porsche sold that many 911s in a decent fortnight.

EightSo which one, actually

I want to be honest about my own bias here, because it changed while I was researching this.

I came into it a V8 loyalist. Hardcore. If somebody handed me the money tomorrow I would still be sorely tempted, because it looks the best, sounds the best, and is by a distance the fastest. It is the one that made an Esprit finally deliver on the promise the shape had been making since 1975.

And having read everything, driven what I could and talked to people who have owned all three, I do not think it is the right answer.

The case for the Sport 300

It is the best of them, and it is not the one to buy.

Both of those are true at once. It is the only one with a limited-slip differential, the only one with the widened track and the cross-braced chassis, the only one with AP Racing brakes and 315-section rear tires, and it is 217 kilograms lighter than an S4S. It is the one Autocar called the best Esprit yet in 1993 and the one Evo went home coveting in 2013. It is the one Lotus's own sales manager names when asked which Esprit he would take for a drive.

It is also the one with roughly 64 examples in existence, a price that Evo already had at upwards of £40,000 (about $62,600) more than a decade ago, and a set of compromises — no sound deadening, air conditioning as a paid extra, a powerband you have to work at — that make perfect sense on a track day and rather less sense on the school run.

Buy one if you can find one and afford one. Just be honest about what you are buying, which is a homologation special with a number plate.

The case for the V8

It is the fastest, the most usable at speed, the most comfortable, the best sounding and the one you would actually drive to the south of France. It is also the heaviest to feel, the one whose chassis is working hardest to contain its own engine, the one with a gearbox that everybody from Lotus's sales manager to Evo's road testers found wanting, and the one carrying an engine that was never allowed to be what it could have been.

And the running costs are real. Walker's warning about the low-slung turbocharger and its steel pipes corroding is not a rumor from a forum, it is the man who sold these cars for a living describing what he saw on the lift.

The case for the S4S, which is the case that wins

Here is the argument, laid out plainly.

And I am not the first person to land here. Andrew Frankel owned an Esprit that could barely finish a journey without breaking, and loved it anyway. Having driven a couple of dozen more since, his advice to anybody shopping is to put the money into an S4, or better still an S4S, because the cars assembled once General Motors was paying the bills were simply built better than what came before.

Which is worth sitting with for a second, because Frankel is the same writer who put the Sport 300 in Dream Cars in the first place — the one who called its steering the finest power assistance ever created and its chassis a flawed diamond. The man who wrote the Sport 300 into the canon is telling you to go and buy the other one.

The photographs in the books tell the same story as the numbers, incidentally. Look at a Sport 300 and it is crouched, hunched, wearing its arches like a boxer's shoulders. Look at an S4S in Norfolk light outside a row of fishermen's huts and it is simply a beautiful car that happens to be extremely fast. One is a machine for a purpose. The other is a machine for a life.

And the thing the S4S does that neither of the others manages is that it is generous. The Sport 300 asks you to be good enough for it. The V8 asks you to find a road long enough for it. The S4S flatters you. Motor Sport's tester kept returning to it — the way it could be retrieved from silly angles under full power, the way it let you balance it on the throttle in the wet and just play, the way it made a professional road tester start thinking about going racing again.

A car that makes you feel better at driving than you are is worth more than a car that makes you feel worse. That is not a spec sheet argument. It is the only argument that survives ownership.

NineThere is no wrong answer here

I have spent several thousand words arguing that one of these is the smart pick, which is a journalist's job. Now let me undercut myself, which is a Lotus owner's job.

You cannot get this wrong. All three are Esprits. All three are the same wedge that a six-year-old will draw for you on request. All three came out of a factory in Norfolk where the roof leaked and the money never quite arrived, built by people who believed, genuinely and against all commercial evidence, that a car should be light and that lightness is a feeling rather than a number.

Every one of them is a working timepiece from the last era in which a small company could build a car that competed with Maranello and Zuffenhausen on ability rather than budget. 2.2 liters and four cylinders taking on a 348 and a 911 Turbo and beating them in places, because somebody in Hethel understood suspension geometry better than anybody in Italy.

That does not exist now. A modern sports car is astonishing, and it is also 2,000 kg of astonishing, filtered through nine layers of software written by people who have never met you, calibrated to be brilliant for everybody and therefore specifically for nobody. It is faster than any of these three by a margin that is frankly embarrassing. It will also never once make you feel like you got away with something.

The Esprit will. Every single time. On a road you know, in a car you understand, with a steering wheel telling you what the front tires found two corners ago.

Simplify, then add lightness. The lightness peaked in 1992 with the Sport 300 and never came back, and in 2004 they stopped altogether. But the shape survived, and it got out, and it is sitting in a drawer in a kitchen somewhere right now on a piece of paper drawn by a six-year-old who has never seen one.

Pointed nose. Low body. Flat top. Wing at the back.

They still know. Somehow, they still know.