Meet the Race 250, Lotus’s £54k Elise

It feels like barely a week goes by without a new Lotus Elise variant landing. And so here’s this week’s, the Elise Race 250.

All cynicism melts way with a name like that, though. The ‘Race’ suffix denotes that this is a car honed for motorsport. So there’s an FIA-compliant roll cage and harnessed carbon race seat, a plastic rear screen, a removable steering wheel and adjustable suspension.

The ‘250’ suffix, meanwhile, is a reference to this Elise’s engine, a supercharged 1.8-litre four-cylinder with 243bhp. Alright, so that’s some generous rounding up, but as we found when we drove the similarly powered, road-going Cup 250, it’s one heck of an alert engine to use.

With some generous options box ticking, you can take your race-spec Elise below 900kg by opting for the carbon aero kit, as displayed here. Vital for slicing tenths from your lap times, no doubt. But pricey to replace should you and your opponents get too close for comfort...

Some weight saving comes as standard, thankfully, with a lithium-ion battery and that carbon seat shaving vital kilos from the Elise’s total mass. You pay for such scrupulousness, though; the £53,500 Race 250 is a full £7,900 more than the Cup 250. The premium buys, um, half a second around Lotus’s Hethel test track, the Race 250’s 1:33.5 lap marginally trumping the Cup 250’s 1:34-dead.

Of course, with its blanked-out lights and FIA compliance, this Race 250 is about so much more than that, and Lotus promises it’ll be eligible for all manner of race series across the world. Fancy it?