Lotus SC - Barcelona to Dover

Pete Wadsworth

Seeing the runway out of the side window of a plane as you come in to land is, it’s pretty safe to say, never the precursor to a smooth, stress-free touch-down. As the wheel to my left piles into the tarmac and my grip tightens on the arm rest, only the ground is visible through my window – clear, blue sky through the one to my right. This is not going well. We feel the plane twist as the tyre that’s already on the black stuff drags the fuselage onto the straight-and-narrow and slams the landing gear on the far wing down onto the Spanish asphalt. It’s far from over though. We go sideways, the momentum of the pivoting fifty-five tonne jet sending us drifting across the runway then, like a driver catching a slide just a bit too late, the pilot sends us back the other way before gathering it all up at the third time of asking. Hard on the brakes as the Terminal looms large, it appears that we’ve survived.

Finger nails extracted from the vinyl, seat cover sufficiently puckered and life satisfactorily shortened we disembark, hoping that near-disaster isn’t an omen for the rest of our trip.

We climb into a taxi, point at a piece of paper with the address of the hotel on it, and enjoy the trip through Barcelona – planning our photography and video locations and finalising our plans for our Friday of bagging the important shots before our long trip back through France to England.

Things aren’t looking up when we arrive at the hotel to find it completely devoid of any Lotus employees – the only thing that stops us panicking a bit is the presence of a scarlet Elise SC parked outside the reception: the car we’ve come here to drive and, ultimately, deliver back to Lotus’s HQ in Hethel. We pay the taxi driver and proceed to the bar to go over our plan, which is something along these lines: spend the rest of Friday caning the Elise on the planned routes around the Spanish mountains, stay the night in the hotel (booked by Lotus), leave early Saturday morning and head up towards Millau to see the viaduct and check out the roads in the neighbouring national park before driving on to Bourges to stay in a little B&B on the Saturday night. Then we have all day Sunday to cover the 400-or-so miles from Bourges to Calais before heading up the M1 to the Peak District in Yorkshire for some more ‘driving roads’.

The blank look on John’s face when I ask if we can check in before collecting the keys told me that I’d cocked up royally – and the bad luck continued apace. We were only meeting at this hotel, not staying at it, so we’d need another place to sleep that night. Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, car journalists are not wealthy folk (unless they present a rather well-known BBC motoring programme) and are especially poor when they’re trying to buy a house, so a night in a Barcelona hotel was out of the question – what is it they say about the best laid plans?

A new and different scheme was quickly cobbled together: we needed to get as far up France as we possibly could – tonight – and cut the journey down to a day-and-a-half from two. The ferry company was phoned and the crossing moved back to 5:30 on the Saturday evening.

We had spied what looked like a good spot to get some pics of the car on our way up the mountain to the hotel so, since Barcelona was offering us blue skies and a pleasant 23 degrees, we took advantage. Pulling out of the hotel in the Aspen White, left-hand drive supercharged Elise, our trip almost ends before we’ve even started. Concentrating as hard as I am on maintaining some kind of ability to operate a piece of machinery that seems infinitely more complex when everything’s the wrong way round, I find myself forgetting that – on the continent – they drive on the wrong side of the road as well as the wrong side of the car. We manage to avoid the oncoming bus.

Right, fresh start. We pull off the road and into the little car park to get some photos done. Simon snaps away while I gather our stuff together. Separating luggage into cabin and boot – and praising Lotus’s generous gift of a couple of pairs of sunglasses – I extract my TomTom Satnav and switch the thing on. Except I don’t. I take my finger off the button and hold it down again – this can’t be happening – the screen stays resolutely black and lifeless, we almost see tears as I realise that I haven’t bought the charger and the photographer clearly fights back a perfectly understandable desire to punch me in the face. The thought of flinging this miracle of modern technology off the cliff to my right doesn’t so much cross my mind as require a rather large dose of self control to prevent it. We’re now in a bit of trouble: the Lotus guys are long gone, neither of us speak Spanish and we have no idea where we are, so even if we manage to get hold of a map, it won’t actually be a great deal of use.

Guess work is our only option so we make our way down towards the city centre. Navigation consists of arriving at a junction and deciding “which way we like most”, or saying things like, “well, there’s four people going that way and only two going the other – so let’s follow the four”. Just as we’re starting to get a bit concerned, Simon almost shouts “A7 to Girona” into my right ear – we were in this neck of the woods for the ‘Student Gumball’ rally in the summer and the snapper has recognised a road we took. Unfortunately neither of us can remember whether Girona takes us back in to Spain or towards France, but we make the decision to join the road anyway and if we don’t see a sign to the land of garlic and cheese within thirty miles or so, we’ll turn round and try the other direction.

Opting to get on the motorway offers the first chance to experience the extra thirty-or-so horsepower liberated by the non-intercooled Eaton-type supercharger, so I hoof it. The flyweight sports car erupts into the flow of typically filthy and dented Bravos, Ibizas and Ducatos in a satisfyingly meaty fashion before beginning the classically furious hunt for the 8,500rpm redline as we hit the half-way round the dial sweet spot. Lotus explained to us that the ‘V-TEC’ style system fitted to this 1.8 litre Toyota lump is an intelligent one and, according to throttle angle, can switch to the aggressive cam profile anywhere between 4,000 and 6,500rpm. Nail the throttle at a cruise between these two points and you can feel the engine sharpen up as it flicks the cams across to the taller lobes.

Top down in the irritatingly glorious northern Spain ‘winter’ we celebrate enthusiastically as the ‘Francia’ sign flashes overhead and start to take in what a comfortable mile-eater this hardcore sports car appears to be. It’s a firm ride, but not jarring – if there’s one thing Lotus does better then absolutely everyone, it’s damping – and the Probax seats are sensational. The heater is working well against the crisp January breeze, there’s hardly any buffeting and, while we’ve put the fact that we still don’t have a map to the back of our minds, can’t help but feel a bit smug. My only concern is that the wind noise brought on by having the top down is masking a slightly shouty 4,000rpm, 93mph gait – but right now, I couldn’t care less.

A couple of hours and three unsuccessful attempts at procuring some sort of system of navigation later we arrive at the French border. Fuel is required so we make sure the next service station is a priority, and keep our fingers crossed that in amongst the meat, cheese, lock knives and bizarre souvenirs that seem to be a staple of European service stations, will be a map of some description. Things look quite promising as we pull into the eerily quiet ‘airs’ and brim the Elise’s tank with Shell’s finest – a quick bit of maths shows that we’ve averaged somewhere in the region of 34mpg on the first leg of our trip – very impressive. 200km down, an awful lot more to go.

A baguette, some pate and a carton of orange juice is consumed over the map I’ve just skimped on – I object to paying a whopping €37 for a proper road map I’ll use once, so opt for the ‘slightly’ less detailed €6.50 fold-out Michelin map of France. We figure out that we’re a few miles west of Argeles-sur-Mer and decide that Clermont-Ferrand would be a good place to aim to stay that night – it looks pretty major (good chance of a hotel), the road we’ll be on goes right through it (good chance of not getting lost) and it is sufficiently far up the country to make arriving in Calais in time to catch our boat a feasible target. But it’s the N9, which intersects the AP-7 west of Montpellier that is our next target: the road that will take us onto the A75, up to Millau and over to the viaduct. It’s getting a bit chilly by this point, so we decide that it’s about time that the roof goes back on - a gloriously simple process that takes the two of us less than a minute. Time to get back on the road.

The miles fall away, and we’re approaching the point at which we need to navigate our way from the road we’re on to the one that will take us to Millau: a simple task according to our map, a not so simple one according to real life. We come off the autoroute, pay a gargantuan toll (still, a small price to pay for such an easy journey) and attempt to skirt our way around Montpellier and onto the N9... and it all goes horribly wrong again.

Luck takes over the situation once more and we find ourselves bouncing between some tiny French villages – fortunately for us they’re connected by some fantastic roads that give us our first chance to sample the joys of threading this Lotus along a quiet country lane.

Left hand drive makes it difficult – I’m just not used to it, and still occasionally punch the door while attempting to change gear - but it really doesn’t matter. The smooth, well-sighted, sinuous ribbons of asphalt offer the perfect hunting ground for Norfolk’s finest and any dawdlers are dispatched with staggering ease. The supercharger really comes into its own here, allowing you to cane it like you would in an R or an S or simply slot it in third and take advantage of the added flexibility offered by crank-driven forced induction - flowing with the road, not worrying about changing up or down and enjoying the steering and suspension that are always the highlight of one of Chapman’s distant grand children.

It seems a pity that this top-of-the-range Elise doesn’t get the utterly fantastic AP brake system fitted to the 2008 Exige - that’s not to say that they aren’t up to the job, but the slightly spongy feeling the new system so successfully got rid of remains in this car. Something of a highlight on this road are the much more road-biased tyres– the limits are still freakishly high (I remain convinced that even an Impreza STi wouldn’t see which way this went) but the line that separates heroics from a fiery death is far wider, in many ways making it an even more involving and enticing driving experience on the road than the magnificent Exige S.

Once again we’re resorting to a large slice of guess work to find our way onto the road we’re aiming for. Exchanges like, “There’s a sign for Vias!”, “Is that the right way?”, “No. But if we can get there, at least I’ll know where we are” become increasingly regular and, as we draw close to the end of the first hour of not really knowing where we are, we start to get worried again.

Then, as we begin to think that now might be a good time to go and buy a better map, a dual carriageway seems to appear from nowhere, complete with a sign to Millau! Hallelujah! We’re back on track! I never thought it was possible to join a motorway in a triumphant fashion but, in the early Friday evening sunset of southern France, I think I achieved it. We need petrol now: time for another pit stop.

As we approach the viaduct we’ve only got one bar of fuel left and, as the miles tick by with no sign of a service station, I’m starting to get concerned. We’re climbing hard into the Pyrenees now and the weather’s getting worse – it’s at this point that Simon notices a warning writ large onto the underside of the soft top, which, to paraphrase says something along the lines of: “you stand a good chance of getting wet today”. We don’t though and, as we crest another hill, we see it. Emerging from the thick fog as a towering ocean liner coming into port, curving gracefully across the Gorge du Tarne - we’ve reached our second target. We’re above the thickest of the clouds, but right in the thinnest as the spectacular illumination of the Millau viaduct casts a spooky glow across each of the needle shaped stanchions that punch through the steel deck. We drive as slowly as we think we can get away with to give ourselves time to take it all in.

We’re still running dangerously low on the expensive stuff, but we manage to make it to the service station just after the bridge. Having made the mistake of getting something to eat and paying £1 for a 6/8ths size Snickers it’s time for the final stint of Friday’s driving. Tiredness is really starting to become an issue now – we arrived at Luton Airport that morning at 5:15am and it’s now 7:30pm, so we’ve been travelling for a little over 14 hours and I’m struggling to keep my eyes open – but we have to push on. Luckily our planned stop-over in Clermont-Ferrand is, we think, just a couple of hours and 170 miles away, but we have to find a hotel once we get there so our journey may end up being a great deal longer than that.

Just over two hours later we realise that we’ve missed our junction off the autoroute and, as I’m considering smashing the Elise into the nearest bridge parapet and ending the whole ordeal then and there, we see something beautiful. The fjords of Norway, Kate Beckinsale and the welds you used to get on Klein mountain bike frames can sod right off – we’ve just seen the sign for an Ibis hotel. Right in front of a Carrefour supermarket.

The sense of relief is almost overwhelming when we realise that there’s a junction right ahead, and we’re positively ecstatic when our Franglais enquiries at the desk reveal that, yes, they do have, “Oon shombrah avec do lee et une doosh pour le nu-wee”. I’ve never been so pleased to arrive somewhere in my entire life. A trip to Carrefour procures tea in the shape of mozzarella, parma ham, a baguette, some cherry tomatoes and one of those amazing fruit tarts you only seem to be able to get hold of on the continent, and we settle in for a night of French X-Factor (appalling like you could never imagine), a reasonably comfy bed and a well-deserved shower.

It’s at the moment just after I’ve climbed into bed that I have a revelation. I have a bizarre feeling that one of the wires that charges my PlayStation controllers is in the bag I’ve bought with me – the last job it did was to transport bits and bobs to my parent’s house at Christmas and it was kicking around in the bottom. Ordinarily this would be completely meaningless but, since the PlayStation is not a Microsoft product, the lead that performs this function is just a common-or-garden USB to mini-USB cable - the very same connector that you use to charge my Satnav from the computer. I almost backflip out of the bed and leg it down to the reception to mime, “Can I please plug this into your PC and leave it here overnight?” The people attending the desk oblige, and I go back to bed safe in the knowledge that our trip across Paris is in the bag.

Morning comes far too soon and we check out of the hotel in the almost-dark of 7:30am – France’s notoriously difficult capital city stands between us and a ferry crossing after all.

Feeling hardcore, we decide that at least some of today’s journey should be done with the top off. This was the wrong decision and, as we pull in for the first of the day’s fuel stops about ten minutes later, we wuss out the roof goes back on. No matter though, we press foot to aluminium and watch as the French countryside begins to look more and more like Kent and start cursing the apparently abysmal battery life of TomTom’s top-of-the-range GPS device.

The chaos of Friday is left behind as we power our way towards Paris, Satnav switched off to preserve enough battery for it to get us through the home of the Renaissance, the pair of us counting down the 450 miles that make up the trip from our hotel to the southern-most tip of the capital.

Paris causes problems for our sub-orbital navigation system. As you arrive from the south there are an awful lot of roads that criss-cross over one and other, get close then peel away, which really confuse the Satnav – they’re ‘only’ accurate to within a couple of metres so it often can’t decide which road we’re on and tells us to take junctions that lead us off and away from our intended path. Fortunately, despite the shocking battery life oversight, the TomTom is actually bloody good at finding its way around the place and quickly works out how to get us back en route – all in the not-so-soothing tones of Eddie Izzard who, after the three millionth “STAY IN THE LEFT LANE!”, is replaced by John Cleese. It’s very lucky that we did manage to get the thing charged since, for want of a better term, we would have been completely screwed if we’d been relying on a map – directions come thick and fast: In four hundred yards, turn left; stay in the right lane; in a hundred yards turn right... and so on and so forth. It’s nerve-wracking, but we make it through without incident or getting completely and utterly lost.

Time to top up for the final time in France: more pate, baguette, Fanta lemon and super unleaded is consumed and we’re starting to feel like we’re almost there, forgetting of course, that we’ve still got 180 miles to Calais and another 140 on the other side of the Channel before our next bed.

The last leg flashes past and, before we know it, we’re arriving in the monumentally horrible city of Calais. It’s now that we remember it’s January and we’re about to cross the channel, so any thoughts of food are abandoned in favour of not paying money to vomit in to the sea, and we make our way to the port.

The boat is delayed and the weather hideous.

Tiredness is beginning to manifest itself as insanity and never have I felt more eager to be at home – regardless of the probably heinous boat trip that lies ahead of us.

Eventually we’re waved into the loading bay and we edge the Elise over the ramps and into position behind a Passat. Scraping together the last of our Euros to spend on pointless rubbish once we’re aboard, we make our way up to the deck to bag a seat. Simon, who’s not good with the sea at the best of times, finds somewhere to close his eyes and breathe deeply and I head off to find something to pass the time, which I find in the biggest bag of Revels I’ve ever seen.

Making your way around the ship turns out to be a real challenge, it’s rocking so much and so quickly that the floor moves towards and away from you between each step – creating an ungraceful walking style reminiscent of ‘the ether scene’ in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I place a Malteaser on the deck and watch it make its way across the floor at an alarming rate. I hear car alarms going off in the hold. My previously solid stomach is starting to fail me.

Luckily we’re only a few minutes away from the green, green grass of home by this point and it’s with no small sense of achievement that we make our way off P&O’s finest and onto the shores of Blighty.

Another fuel stop at Dover, a short trip up the M20 and we’re onto the mercifully traffic-light M25. A quick drag race with an Evo proves the pace of the Supercharged Elise and, as we catch signs for the M1 and St Albans our epic trip comes to an end.

I’m not ready to feel disappointed that the trip’s over yet, I’m tired like I’ve never been tired before but a night’s sleep in a decent bed brings happy memories of a good thrash across Europe with my brother. We’ve reached the conclusion that the Elise SC is a fine car, offering a satisfying extra dimension to an already excellent package. It was a perfectly acceptable tourer then, when the road turned twisty, was a hugely entertaining companion. I’d still have an Exige S with the performance pack, but for someone less willing to put up with the coupe’s slightly harsher nature, the soft-top version would be a fantastic choice.