Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Lotus Elise Handing Myth Or Heavenly Grip

Having seen, on this site, some claims of amazing handling from the Lotus Elise and the great write ups for the car on the road in car magazines. I having owned a Vauxhall VX200 Turbo (based on the Elise chassis) and a similarly configured Zenos E10S and have driven a few Elises on track I thought it be good to share Mark Hales dsription of how the Elise works when pushed to near the limit.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=23&t=1690418

I also share a mid engined Ultima and race a mid engined Fun Cup Car and can feel the difference of having the central weight and a rear engined car.

It is also interesting to know that Lotus designed in bump steer to help manage the handling for their customers!

Having just picked up my Morgan Club Sport and the following day taken it to Goodwood I have not experienced any bad behaviour which I experienced with both the VX and E10 and the Morgan just as quick IMHO.

Oh I should say I dropped the ride height on the Vauxhall and it become worse. In the wet it was a monster andI have spun it on a very we track day 3 times!

Both the Ultima and the re car needed a small amount of throttle when on th limit to stabilise them and it weight more central.

i've developed a mk1 MX5 as my track toy as it's easier to be a hooligan with FR. That and the fact an Elise has very expensive clams to fix if i hit something! The Elise is now road only where i enjoy superlative feel and incisive handling within its limits. It's good to have both though, quite different.

i wouldn't judge a fun/driver's car just on how quick they are. there are challenges to MR and RR that make life...interesting.

Were you at the BHM Goddwood track day? If so I have a few photos of you. In time (I am away for almost 4 weeks) I can send you some copies. Not high resolution I am afraid because BHM want them for websites and social media , not a photographic record.

I was out in a MX5 a few weeks ago and it is a brilliant track day car with very few vices. It is also very easy to feel the weight transfer and to learn to drive it on the limit. The Elise is a very quick car but has some challenges when driven quickly. Most drivers do not use more than 50% of the cars ability so never know.

Yes I was at BHM’s track day at Goodwood. I thought it was a really good day. They even let me on the track having hit 104 Db on the noise test, probably as the exhaust had no carbon in it LOL. They told me where the track side mics where so I could short shift and not trip them.

As for the Club Sport it was the first time I had driven a Club Sport in the dry (I raced one at the Race Of Remembrance last year, it was very wet all weekend) I was surprised at the amount of grip. It is a quick car with few vices. Looking forward to racing it.

My Mk2.5 MX5 is for sale, if anyone is interested.

My own experience of my Elise on track was much as described in that article - great until the back end let go and then I couldnt recover it.
However, I remember an episode of Top Gear with Clarkson saying much the same thing. In the following episode they brought along Matt Becker who was then the Lotus enineer in change of handling and is now doing something similar at Aston. He showed how to drift a standard Elise round the bends proving that its can be done and is a skill issue as much as anything else.

In the dry it is easy to get the Elise maximise its grip, if very counter intuitive for most drivers.

What it asks you to do is to take up the suspension movement and then turn in under a trailing throttle and wait.... when the back end starts to slip feed power on to transfer weight (and grip) to the rear. To much throttle will make the car to run wide with understeer, to little and the rear will continue into a spin.

Most drivers do not apply more throttle when they feel the car going at the back end. Instinct makes them come off the power and then the back end of the car if unmanageable.

To drift the Elise just wait a fraction longer before applying the throttle. That said it the slow option.

In the wet the balance between supporting the rear and asking the rear tyres to do too much, so having a power spin is very tricky and shutting the throttle just makes the situation much worse.

This is what a good friend of mine who also drives an Elise Toyota R since many years thinks about the article in pistonheads and in the following he tells his own experiences.

His full write up:

"I'm not sure how in tune the author of that review is in regards to weight transfer....

The Elise has a nearly ideal front-to-rear weight balance. My only complaint with the setup is the relatively high rear roll center, which is due to the high center of gravity thanks to the engine standing vertical (required by the transmission setup). However, this isn't attributing to the lift throttle oversteer that the author is describing. My complaint leads to maybe a percent difference in maximum cornering speed due to the inside to outside weight transfer - not something that affects the feel of the car (at least not in this way).

The beauty of the rear weight bias is that slowing down while turning-in encourages the car to rotate in the direction of the turn. This means you need less lateral grip in the tires to afford the same intertial moment, which means you can use that extra grip for slowing the car down faster (which creates an even larger moment). The trick is to brake in a straight line as long as possible, ease off the brake ever so slightly to get the turn-in, and modulate the steering angle and brake force to establish the ideal rotational intertia for the corner.....at just before the apex, you want to be at the minimal braking force and maximum steering input, at which point if you removed all forces and magically turned the road to ice in an instant, the car would continue off the track, but it would be spinning like a top. It's the spinning like a top that you're trying to generate when entering a corner (rally car drivers do it in a much more magnificent way because the peak grip levels are lower). It's this spinning moment that allows a higher cornering velocity because you don't need to use tire grip to rotate the car (rotate as in get it to spin like the top). You get to dedicate all the grip in the lateral direction which keeps you in the corner (we think of it as "turning" but this is a slightly different force - there's going around the corner and twisting like a top and they're different). Anyways, this rotational intertia is why this driver is spinning out on the corner entry. The cure is a healthy dose of gas pedal....not to accelerate the car, but to squeeze the weight back onto the rear tires. You have to be a bit quick (but smooth) in this transition, otherwise you lose the spinning inertia you just created while braking....and when you give it enough gas, you're adding to the spinning intertia because it's the rear tires pushing the car forward. It's really the same force happening twice if you think about it....when accelerating, the rear tires are pushing outward, so it causes the car to spin more. While braking, instead of the tires pushing, it's the weight in the rear of the car pushing outward on the car. This is why mid-rear setups are ideal, because you get to accelerate the spinning of the top in both braking and acceleration.

It's totally counter-intuitive, but it's how Formula 1 cars are setup because you get an extra 7 to 12% of cornering speed (depending on how tight the corner is and how long it is, etc...).

What this guy describes is a lot of vagueness with weight transfer and of course he's spinning out because he doesn't know what he's doing. The reason a lot of people say the Elise drives like it's on rails is because they're usually not entering the corners fast enough (not braking hard enough), and they're able to floor it out of the corner because they never created the turning moment (also, the car is slightly under-powered). This makes it feel like the car has tons of traction because you're limited by the front grip and can always power out of everything (which feels fast, but isn't). If you're really at the limit of front grip - which means braking hard to get the weight up front, then the oversteer comes on very quickly after turn in - and this is when you have to do the counter-intuitive action of using the gas pedal (at the apex). If you squeeze it on like you're supposed to, you feel the car start to push again (because you lose front grip from the weight transfer), and then as you continue to squeeze the throttle, the rear end starts to "lose grip" from the rotational moment created by the rear tires pushing outward. This allows the steering angle to reduce (ideally pointing straight at the apex), so that the front tires are entirely dedicated to lateral grip - which is the maximum trajectory through a corner. Then as you approach corner exit, the steering input stays mostly the same (maybe some slight counter-steer) and the gas pedal is squeezed harder and harder until you're flooring it out of the corner and the car is pointing straight down the track. Of course that is idealized from the maths, but you do see the F1 drivers doing this in general....it's just obfuscated by the bumps in the road requiring lots of pedal/steering modulation.

Anyways, I don't hear that in this guy's description of the car's balance....he's just complaining that the rear end walks around in an unexpected way.

He probably is accustomed to driving something with a front engine, like maybe a Miata with it's 50/50 balance....These cars feel more nimble because you don't need to wait for the weight transfer. The weight is already on the front wheels because the engine is in the front. This means the total amount of time between a steering decision and reaching the peak lateral acceleration is shorter in a Front-Rear car than it is for a Mid-Rear. I think Formula 1 would prefer more weight in the rear of the car than they currently use, but it's more important to have a lower center of gravity than more rear weight bias - this is due to how much the car wants to lean. One thing to note - even if the car doesn't actually lean, the weight transfer is still the same as if it were leaning. In other words, weight transfer is a function of center of gravity. We want to minimize lateral weight transfer, but maximize front-to-rear transfer. (This is where high-dive, low-roll comes from). Anyways, more weight in the back yields higher peak lateral forces, but it takes longer to get to that peak lateral force because you need the weight to shift from back to front before there is enough front grip to create the maximum rotational moment (spinning like a top). You already have front grip on a front-rear car, so it takes way less time on the brakes, but there's no pendulum effect during braking to help the car turn during the corner entry. You only get the turning moment when you're on the gas pedal at the corner exit....and you'll never get as much weight on the rear of the car as the rear-engine cars, which means you accelerate slower out of the corner due to limited rear grip. The Front-Rear car feels faster, but it's not actually faster on the stopwatch. This is where I get torn on something like the Miata with its perfect weight balance - because it feels nimble and does what I tell it to right away. With something like the Elise, you have to prepare for the corner ahead of time and make sure you're going fast enough that you don't slow down to much when braking hard enough. This is totally doable on the race track (especially faster corners), but on a normal road (like the Eifel), you're not able to trust the road surfaces enough to drive at that kind of limit on corner entry. So in a way, Front-Rear might be more fun for more casual driving....


Anyways, those are just some entertaining thoughts since it is totally very "counterintuitive" and might even be justified to say it feels slow too....but there's a reason F1 follows the same type of setup (and Lotus was a major factor in defining that recipe)."