I finally decided to make my own journal for my 2007 Lotus Exige S
The Lotus Elise S1 and S2 were originally a dream car of mine since 2000 when I first saw one in a magazine as an teenager
Before actually purchasing my Exige, I was driving a E46 M3 which I was tracking and enjoyed very much but as my friend was selling his Exige I knew that I had to get it or else I would regret this years down the road.
I was on the fence of actually purchasing the car until I finally drove it.
That very first sweeper I took going at 80km/h made me realize how different the car was compared to my E46 M3, and that moment I got addicted.
After I took ownership of the car, I quickly did an oil change and went to Pacific Raceway for a track day the first week.
despite being my first time on the exige at the track, i managed to run a very similar time to that of my modified e46 m3 which was a respectable 1:38:xxx
after the first track day with the exige, i had a rough idea on what i wanted to improve on the car and what i wanted to add
first mods that i put on the car were a larini dual tip exhaust and a difflow 5 element railer diffuser
shortly after installing these 2 mods i headed to another track day at the ridge motorsport park, which was my first time at the ridge actually, i instantly fell inlove with the ridge and preferred it over pacific raceway
that was the last track day of the 2012 season
during the winter i decided to strip my car and continue with the mods
at this point i decided to upgrade the suspension of the car and went with nitron 2-way adjustable coilovers
nitron vs stock track pack bilstein
before actually installing this set of coilovers nitron introduced their new 46mm race suspension which is an improvement over the older nitron 40mm suspension
i decided to quickly jump on the 46mm and sold the 2-way adjustable since it would probably do more harm than good as I would not know how to properly adjust 2-way coilovers anyways
after my suspension was installed i decided to improve upon the aero of the car to make it even more stable than it already was.
i added:
APR Canards
APR GT-200 Wing w/ Custom wing brace made by my good friend Austin at FFD
IMRP Side Sills
at this point the car was looking closer to completion in terms of aesthetics
shortly after completing these aero, i knew i had to balance the whole car by adding a splitter
the first concept of the splitter turned out to be too wide and not sticking out enough
since this first revision wasn't sturdy enough as it was flapping a lot on the highway i decided to remove it and continue to do more track days and get more seat time
in between 2012 and 2013, i decided to make the exige more reliable than it already is since the powerplant is from a toyota celica
stock exige s has fuel and oil issues when running r-comps so i replaced the stock oil pan with a baffled oil pan and also added a surge tank
to make sure the car had adequate cooling, i changed out the stock intercooler with a bigger intercooler from RLS and enlarged intercooler tubes
at this point i was very satisfied with how the car was handling and looked but under some highspeed turns i felt the front lifting a bit compared to before due to the imbalance of the aero setup.
with the help of Curtis from The Speed Syndicate, he fabricated an effective splitter that was chassis mounted to the crash structure of the car making it viable for the track
this pretty much concludes the journey of the lotus for now, i ended the season by running a personal best of 1:53:9xx at the ridge motorsport park
i still have some new plans for it from 2015 to improve it even more but we will leave that for another post in the future
until then, here are some more pictures
