GRR Garage: Lotus Elise Cup 250 – compromise isn’t bad

Saying that, many performance cars are multipurpose. A hot hatch should be good to drive but with useable back seats. A fast estate should be hilariously fast but quite able to stow an Ikea dining table, and so on.

Supercars, in some ways, were the exceptions. They used to be very compromised – fast and exciting, but lacking any practicality. Some were pretty shocking to drive, too. Today it’s a different story, as a McLaren 720S is as good at covering ground in comfort as a Rolls-Royce, albeit with less luxurious carpet.

Compromise is a rare thing, then, unless you buy a Lotus Elise Cup 250.

It’s fair to say by purchasing a Lotus you are committing to an experience. You can’t give more than one person a lift, you will struggle to get in and out of your car with grace (it can be done, but it’s a real challenge), and you certainly can’t move an Ikea dining table. But the word compromise should not be taken as a negative.

There are some downsides to the Elise Cup 250 experience, of course, and I’ll discuss those at a later date, but without so many modern fripperies you’re presented with a performance road car in its very purest sense. 

As you may have seen, we went out and filmed the Elise Cup 250 recently. You can live with Elise Cup 250 every day, as we have been and as many people probably do, but how often do you go out for a drive for the sake of driving? Perhaps not too often, and that was the entire purpose of that day, to get the car out and let it do what it’s good at.

Buying an Elise Cup 250 is a commitment, but there will be drives, like the one I enjoyed, where you’ll be grinning ear to ear at the purity of it all. That’s what makes a Lotus special.