"Noisy, but nice - the smallest, prettiest and most intriguing GT car in a decade. The Elite will outcorner anything on four wheels"

Road and Track,1964

The Lotus Elite was so advanced for its time that, even today, it is considered a veritable milestone in automotive design. The monocoque chassis/body unit, the Formula-I suspension and the aerodynamic body surface gave the Elite a performance that belied its tiny power plant. It's rounded, flowing motion-esque styling impressed the world's car enthusiasts. Forty-five years after its introduction, some 750 of the original 1000+ Elites are known to still be in the hands of, and driven by, sports car aficionados and collectors around the world.

The Lotus Elite is constructed of fiberglass. Similar to the design of aircraft, the Elite has a stressed skin formed around bulkheads, thus rendering its structure torsionally rigid. The fiberglass is thickest where the stress is highest and thin where there is minimal stress. At 3000 ft-lb per degree of twist, the handling of the Elite is nothing short of spectacular. This type of construction, known as a monocoque structure, is used by today's Formula-I cars. Ultra-expensive, hand-built cars like the 1997 Ferrari F-50 and 2003 Porsche GT are among the few contemporary road cars with monocoque construction, as this design is very complex and expensive to build. The Elite, at an original cost of $4780, is the world's greatest automotive engineering bargain.

The Elite was designed to race at the track or on the road with minimal air drag. Frank Costin, DeHaviland Aircraft's chief aerodynamic engineer, contibuted to the design of the body shape of the Elite.The top surface of the car acted as an inverted airplane wing, using Costin's reverse camber principle, giving smooth air flow and increased downforce at speed. The Elite's undersurface was enclosed, molded in flat fiberglass to eliminate underbody turbulence and resulting lift. The low drag coefficient (0.29) and car weight (1500 lbs) delivered a high top speed (140+ mph) with a very small all-aluminum engine (1216 cc, 105 hp).

These data would be very impressive for a modern, computer-designed GT car. For a 1950's car such advanced design technology is a testament to the genius of Lotus founder Colin Chapman.