What I’ve learned about track-driving a mid-engined Lotus Elise

If you asked any enthusiast to name the best vehicles ever for driver reward then you could be sure that the Lotus Elise would, if it wasn’t first choice, at least place in the top three.

Which is why I own one.

But what exactly is driver reward, and why would you care?

For reward, car or otherwise, you first need a task which is impossible to perfect. That task must demand complex, varied skills, and reward in proportion the mastery of those skills. This is why more people play chess than noughts-and-crosses. It is why sports rules are set to make the sport difficult, but not too difficult – darts players don’t stand 30cm from the board or 30m.

Driving fast on a racetrack is also impossible to perfect. Nobody will ever manage a lap which is impossible to improve upon, despite what OldMate58 says in the pits, but it’s fun to try, and you can get what appears to be pretty close. And to drive fast you need a blend of technical knowledge, speed and physical coordination, all spiced with a frisson of danger.

Understanding the racing line and how car dynamics work is a complex mental challenge. The physical skill of heel’n’toe downshifts is difficult. It’s one thing to understand the racing line, and quite another to execute it.

But the reward is there; when you smash the brakes approaching a corner, perfectly rev-match the downshift, then ease off and feel the car gently rotating on the edge of adhesion before you kiss the apex and power out to the edge it feels great, and it feels better if you understand why and how things are happening, theory into practice…a real sense of satisfaction.  If it were easy, it wouldn’t be rewarding or involving.

So let’s talk about how the Elise involves its driver, and there’s two main ways – skills and the sensation. The sensation requires no skill; just characteristics of the car anyone can enjoy. That starts with the light weight, which means agility far beyond a normal car let alone other sportscars – if your average roadcar is a pony, a sportscar may be a large dog and the Elise is a cat.

The sensation is also about the mid-engined layout with the noisy heart behind your head, and the low bonnet with wheelarches either side of your field of view. It means the what-is-that-cool-car looks. And it means the soft suspension which gives a surprisingly pliant ride; with a lightweight car you don’t need hugely stiff springs to control body roll. There’s also no power steering, so you’ve got a very direct interface to the road – driving a normal roadcar is watching a movie on VHS, the average sportscar is the same movie on DVD, and the Elise is 8k high-definition; you notice nuances, details that simply can’t be experienced in lesser machinery – imagine stroking a dog with your fingertips, then with a garden glove. Every corner is a gift even at low speeds, and at higher speeds the gifts become sensations.

Now let’s talk about the skills, and that starts with the mid-engined layout. Which everyone knows is the best for sportscars, but why?

First, let’s dispense with the ridiculous myth that is the ‘perfect’ 50/50 weight distribution. That isn’t, hasn’t ever been, and won’t ever be perfect for any sports car. The 50/50 idea is that half the weight is over each axle, and half the traction work is done by the front and rear axles. But there’s two problems with that. First, a 50/50 weight distribution can be achieved by having various masses a long distance from the centre of the car…imagine two kids on a seesaw. That’s 50/50, but terrible dynamics. You want your weight close to the centre of the vehicle. Second, at almost no point on a racetrack do the front and rear axle do the same amount of ‘work’. Under braking, there’s a weight shift and therefore grip shift to the front. Acceleration; it’s the reverse. Also, the front wheels steer, and the other wheels may drive, or not. The car is constantly turning, braking, accelerating…this 50/50 idea only holds true if all four wheels steer and drive equally and the car holds a constant radius turn. There’s nothing wrong with 50/50, but it’s not the only solution, especially from front-drive cars.

In fact, the best weight distribution for a rear-drive sports or racing car is mostly over the rear, with the engine centred, a configuration known as ‘MR’ for mid-engined, rear drive; others are FR for front-engine, rear drive, and FF for front-engine, front drive, and FA for front-engine, all wheel drive and so on. The MR layout delivers the quickest cars for tarmac sporting vehicles; having most of the mass centrally or a little rear allows better braking and accelerating, and improved agility. For proof through history you need only research the transition of Formula 1 cars from front to mid-engine; once the Cooper T43 and T45 began to win, all others had to follow. And so the Elise, a driver-focused car,  is mid-engined because the practical advantages of a front-engined laypout are less important that the car’s handling and reward.

So it’s important to understand what the mid-engined layout means to a driver if you’re to be either safe or quick – and here we go with the knowledge part of reward.

The more weight on a tyre, the more grip there is, but it’s not linear – double the weight doesn’t mean double the grip. The Elise runs around 38% of its weight on the front wheels, which isn’t very much; a typical front-engined, rear drive sports car would be maybe 52%, and a front-engined, front-drive sports car around 60%. The greater weight at the rear means when cornering there’s more force pushing the back of the car outwards – centripetal force – so you need more grip to compensate. That’s why the Elise has taller and wider tyres at the back compared to the front, a staggered layout.

It’s also important to differentiate between load transfer and weight transfer. Motorcyclists and sidecar racers do a lot of weight transfer – they physically move their bodies into different locations on the vehicle, and the rider’s bodies are a significant part of the total weight.

In contrast, cars can’t really do weight shift. There’s maybe a fraction of movement the fuel in the tanks, but not much else.

What cars do is load transfer – when they brake for example a lot of load (not weight) goes onto the front wheels, which presses the tyres into the track and provides more grip.

Now we know that, let’s start with the Elise accelerating. With all that weight over the back, the Elise has lots of grip…at the rear. So you’re relatively unlikely to have the back end step out due to power-on oversteer compared to a FR car, especially if it has an open differential like mine – a more powerful Exige with a limited-slip diff is more likely to break traction on both wheels under acceleration. What you do get with the Elise under power is…understeer. Yes, understeer, as in running wide, as you have lots of rear grip natrually, and then when you use that grip to accelerate reduce load (and grip) on the front, and increase load (and grip) on the rear. So you need to manage that, more of which later – that’s part of the skill. Incidentally, the Elise has a good power-to-weight ratio but not much power, so it accelerates quickly at low speed but lacks the power to punch through the air at higher speed when it’s all about power, not weight.

Then we come to braking, which in my view is the most fun part of driving an Elise. When you brake, there’s a load transfer to the front with consequent increase in grip. Now we know the Elise doesn’t have much weight on the front wheels, and braking shifts load to the front, so you can do a lot of braking! In fact, if you brake an Elise at around 0.7g – which is about half what its maximum braking capacity depending on tyres – then you’ll achieve a 50/50 front/rear load distribution which is about what a FR car starts at when not moving. Combine that with the light weight, and there’s your second skill; learning just how hard you can go on the brakes deep into a corner.

And you need to brake hard. You need grip to turn, and by braking you’re adding load, and therefore grip to the front so it turns. Try braking an Elise, jumping off the brakes and the turning…it’ll arc gracefully but not turn. Oh and don’t try this anywhere near a wall! So your next skill is braking whilst turning, something known as trailbraking, and it’s essential for Elise drivers to get the best from their car.

But we’re not done yet. Another skill is rotating the car under brakes. When you brake and turn, as the centre of gravity of the car is some distance behind the front wheels compared to FF or FR, and there’s a nice big mass of engine towards the back, then the car can rotate into the corner with little aid from the steering wheel – one famous racing driver, can’t remember who, talked of the steering wheel just being used to “introduce the car to the corner”. This to my mind is huge fun, and it’s a very, very difficult skill to master; too much rotation and you’re skiddingly too slow, too little and you’re giving away hundredths of a second. This behaviour is not unique to MR cars, but it is more prevalent. It’s related to lift-off oversteer where you turn into a corner under power, then lift off the accelerator and the back swings out into oversteer.

So now we need to talk about oversteer recovery, and that’s difficult in an Elise for two reasons. First, the centre of gravity is quite a long way back from the front axle, so when the car starts rotating there’s a lot of mass on the move. Second, the Elise has a short wheelbase which is good for agility but not for stability. So, any oversteer corrections need to be extremely rapid and decisive otherwise around you go.  Longer FR cars are more forgiving as their mass is nearer the front axle, and a longer wheelbase helps.  The FF cars can be powered out from oversteer as the rear wheels are the ones that have lost grip and the front wheels are driving. Please don’t try that on anything rear wheel drive. I don’t know why, but OldMate58’s solution to every driving problem always seems to be more power.

Slamming the power on a rear-drive car like the Elise in an oversteer situation isn’t a good idea; that’s because the rear tyres have already lost traction so demanding even more through use of the accelerator won’t work. However, you certainly don’t want to jump off the accelerator as that causes an abrupt load shift (and therefore grip shift) off the rear wheels – the best technique is to look where you want the car to go, keep the steering wheels pointed in that direction, and maintain throttle or very smoothly and slowly reduce it.

Oversteer recovery is scary for many drivers and that’s because motorsports as a whole does an appallingly bad job of training people before they take to the track. Your car needs to comply with many pages of dense regulations that tax even the understanding of a mechanic, but you as a driver, need to know nothing about track driving – it’s just good luck into Turn 1 at 200km/h, you’ll be right and we’ve got a crew to sweep up the pieces if you’re not. I contrast this attitude with other high risk sports which at least attempt to train its participants before their first go. Even finding car control courses can be difficult.

One easy way to make any car less dangerous or scary is tyres; specifically, relatively narrow road/track tyres. As these tyres approach their grip limit they tend to be noisy and slowly offer less traction, whereas grippy race tyres are more like grip, grip, grip….and we’re now upside down off the track. So, it could well be the case that using 95% of a road tyre you’re not scared of is quicker, less expensive, and more fun, than using 70% of a race tyre you dare not approach the limit on. Don’t buy laptimes with equipment, buy laptime with training and knowledge. Because that way you’ll truly explore the limits of what you own, and that’s where and how you find true involvement and reward.