First time you take a corner at max-g in a Lotus 2-Eleven, it's going to hurt. The seat digs into your ribcage, your eyeballs will try to pop out the side of your head. Taking a set of S-curves is a series of slamming oscillations that leaves you short of breath and disoriented. The rush of wind buffets your crash helmet, the noise trembles your ears.
That's what makes a flyweight, sticky-tired roadster like this such a new and finally addictive experience. In a closed-cockpit road-based supercar, be it 911 or Corvette or Ferrari, you operate the controls from a relatively placid environment. And as those road cars weigh at least twice as much, so they simply can't take the kind of rapid direction-changes this Lotus thrives on.
It's based on the Elise aluminum chassis, with Toyota's 1.8-liter variable-lift four-banger, hopped up to 252 horsepower by virtue of Lotus's supercharger installation. There's no roof, windshield, doors, HVAC, headlamps or stereo. It's truly butt-naked, and weighs under 1500 pounds. Lotus claims it catapults from 0-60 in 3.8 seconds and through the quarter-mile in 12.2 seconds. This is an extreme machine.
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