I can remember asking team manager George Howard-Chappell whether it was true that Alex could take the notorious Windsock corner flat out and he said that, sure, Alex was flat.
‘How,’ I asked incredulous.
‘He just goes flat,’ came the reply. And somewhere I have a photograph of me in that car going through that corner, with showers of sparks flying out from underneath it. And I was nowhere near flat.
But it was another GT-badged Esprit that really caught my eye this week. I knew Gavan Kershaw – whose job it is to determine how a Lotus drives – was coming over to say hello, I didn’t know he’d turn up in his immaculate Esprit GT3. There I was, just about to get in an Emira, being greeted by an old mate and all I wanted to do was go and drool over his car.
Do you remember the GT3? It came in 1997, towards the end of Esprit production and can best be described as an Esprit ClubSport. It was stripped out, with air-conditioning, plush seats, airbags, sound deadening and stereo all consigned to the options list. The big rear wing was gone, as were the 18-inch OZ split rim alloys of the contemporaneous Esprit V8. But the big news was the engine: it was the first Esprit model since the 1970s to be fitted as standard with a 2.0-litre engine instead of the 2.2-litre motor used from the S2 onwards. This was spun by Lotus as a means of keeping the price down, though I was told on the quiet it was a way of getting rid of a batch of unwanted 2.0-litre motors created specifically as tax break specials for the Italian market. Things got notably more expensive for engines larger than this, which is why Ferrari went to so far as to create 2.0-litre V8 engines for the 308 to sell out there, both with and without turbos. But that’s another story.