Lotus broke the rules for the first time with the Esprit V8

Four is reasonably enough when it comes to the cylinder number of car engines. With three jars you also get very far, but with four pieces every conceivable car can achieve awe-inspiring performance. In Formula 1, for example. And think of the Group B rally cars, whose horses flew so hard out of the stable at one bad moment that they had to be stopped. Nowadays, four is the norm again anyway. In the 90s it was very different. Think of the brilliant Saab 9000, which according to the press would ‘scream for a V6’. The final GM block had nothing extra to offer except a somewhat sultry voice. Or take Lotus, which thrived with four-cylinder engines. In the Lotus Esprit Sport 300, for example, the 2.2-unit brought it to no less than 306 hp and 389 Nm, enough to help the 1,215 kilo light two-seater with formidable performance. But yes, he could never compete with a Ferrari, because in the back there were only four miserable pistons bouncing up and down. The poverty!

Nonsense of course, but the British manufacturer could only remove that idea from the buyers’ ears by building a V8. That turned out to be a mighty machine, developed in-house. It had a capacity of 3.5 liters, 24 valves and turbo power, with which Lotus had a lot of experience. The V8 even had two, with which he recorded royal figures on the printouts of the test bench: a maximum of 507 hp and 450 Nm. Nice and nice, but it wasn’t meant to be. And that because of a typical shortcoming of a poor manufacturer that has to make do with available belts: for the five-speed gearbox from the Renault Safrane, 354 hp and 400 Nm was the maximum. This made the Lotus Esprit the fastest of all versions of the model series introduced in 1976. Only he missed a nice soundtrack; the firing order associated with the ‘flat’ crankshaft made the V8 sound like a… four-cylinder. If only we had made very little progress.