GUESS WHO'S BACK?

No classic is safe from the clutches of the restomod movement... now its the Lotus Esprit's turn for an Encor

- WORDS JASON BARLOW PHOTOGRAPHY OLGUN KORDAL

Wait, what... another restomod? Any fatigue is extinguished the nanosecond you set eyes on the Encor Series 1. Sounds like a photocopier, but rare indeed is the car that looks this good straight out of the box.

Sure, it helps no end that it 'remasters' the original Lotus Esprit, a 1970s statement car that united the maverick engineering talents of Colin Chapman with the audacious design vision of Giorgetto Giugiaro, and then became globally famous when some bloke called James Bond drove it into the Tyrrhenian Sea in The Spy Who Loved Me. That's quite the USP.

Encor, which consists of senior ex-Aston and Lotus personnel along with a British engineering firm called Skyships, is addressing a very modern malaise, though. New cars might be fast and clever but they're also porky, complicated, and often too powerful. So this new machine is a philosophy as well as a car. It emphasises the stuff that made the original Esprit so cool - the wedge design and its amazingly alert chassis - but junks the stuff that compromised it. Most importantly, it commits to the idea that 400bhp is plenty in a car that weighs less than 1,200kg. Encor can do this because, of course, it uses a donor car, and isn't bound by Byzantine emissions and safety regs. So although this looks like an Esprit S1, underneath it's actually a last of the line 3.5-litre V8, in production until 2004. Peak Esprit, in terms of dynamics and performance. The Type 918 engine was all aluminium, had a flat plane crank, 32 valves, and two turbos. The rear transaxle originated in the Renault 25, but even with major Lotus modifications it was never particularly sweet shifting. Or strong. In fact, it detuned the V8 from its 500+bhp potential to 350 so that it didn't lunch the gearbox. The donor car's fundamentals are carried over here the steel backbone chassis, engine block, gearbox casing and a few ancillaries. Encor insists, with some justification, that its S1 is pretty much a new car.