Lotus Esprit Sport 300

The story

The Sport 300 was born on American racetracks. Lotus's X180R Esprits won races in SCCA World Challenge and IMSA's supercar series, and this car carried that hardware onto the road: a stiffened chassis, a rear track widened by 50 mm with arches to cover it, AP Racing brakes, staggered 16- and 17-inch wheels and a limited-slip differential the cheaper S4S never received. Thinner composite panels and a stripped cabin cut the weight to 1,243 kg (2,738 lb), and a hybrid turbocharger pulled 302 hp from just 2.2 liters, a remarkable output per liter for 1993.

It is not an easy car. Boost arrives in earnest only near 5,000 rpm, so the wrong gear leaves it sluggish and the right one makes it ferocious; Autocar's in-gear times swung from lazy to Viper-quick purely on the driver's choice of ratio. The shift is heavy, the visibility poor and the cabin bare. But the steering, still cited decades later as one of the finest power-assisted systems ever fitted to a road car, and a nose that bites the instant the wheel moves explain why this is the Esprit enthusiasts dream about. Surprisingly, it rides well, too.