It’s not often that you drive a car that holds you upside down, turns out your pockets and shakes you by the ankles until all your preconceptions fall to the ground and smash to pieces. But the Lotus Elise wasn’t like other cars.

I vividly remember my first time driving an Elise, in 1996, when barely anyone outside of Lotus had driven it. As one of a select few members of motoring press invited to come and experience it (under embargo ahead of the first reviews being published), we’d spent a day experiencing it on the then-small and frankly shabby Hethel circuit, and it was good, very good. But then so it should be on home turf. The bigger question that was most relevant to its existence was how good would it be on the road?

I was all set to take one of the first production cars away for a week. It had taken months and months of arm-twisting and, in all honesty, arguments to ensure our magazine (Auto Express) got to drive the Elise at the same time as the likes of Autocar and Car so that we could publish our review to the agreed embargo date, and now the moment was upon us I was ready to make the most of it.

The first mission was to drive it from the Lotus HQ on Pot Ash Lane, south of Norwich, back to our office on Blackfriars Bridge. The night before, I’d traced a fluorescent marker pen along the pages of my road atlas, carving the most long and winding route possible through Norfolk and Essex before ending up in the Capital. And it’s that drive that remains with me to this day.

Driving the first Lotus Elise

There can be no better, tougher test of a car than driving it on public roads. This is where all manner of demands face man and machine: unsighted corners mix with slower traffic; cambers conspire with potholes; traffic lights and roundabouts test the progression of the brakes and visibility out of the cockpit; mixed road surfaces transmit noise and challenge the progression from grip to slip.

Yet almost immediately, the Elise felt entirely novel. At low speeds its nose pattered and clattered ever so slightly over bumps with minimal, flat movements, and the unassisted yet surprisingly light steering glided across the rack without a hint of slack. You could make ultra-quick direction changes without having to take your hands off the wheel, and the nose followed faithfully.

As it got faster there this deftness of touch became all the more apparent. You teased the steering and the Elise responded. With a kerbweight of 725kg, there was an agility and immediacy that nothing this side of a Caterham 7 could match, and yet in the Elise you were sat in comparative comfort, with a spacious cabin, comfortable seats and aluminium everywhere you looked – including the distinctive pedal set which was so perfectly arranged for the keen driver, and tiny Stack instrument set.

The car’s impressively slight weight was achieved by making the Elise out of double-glazing. Okay, that’s not strictly true, but it was the first car to use a similar bonding technology to that used in extruded aluminium double glazing windows, developed by Lotus together with Ciba Polymers of Switzerland and Hydro Aluminium, of Denmark. But that wasn’t all. The brakes were Metal Matrix Composite, made from special silicon-carbide sintered aluminium by the US-based Lanxide Corp (and later dropped to cut costs), and the body was made from Lotus’ signature material, glassfibre.

Part aluminium, part composite, entirely excellent

It’s how Lotus could get away with using a humble 1.8-litre engine, in this case the light and revvy, four-cylinder Rover K-series which turned out a modest 118bhp. But as I was to discover on that first drive, it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it, and in the light Elise the K-series delivered an almost perfect power-to-weight ratio of a little more than 160bhp per ton which was enough to make it spirited and entertaining when you stretched it to the red line without being so powerful that it would ever overwhelm the back tyres through power alone.

Later Elise and even Exige cars would boast more power but I don’t think I have ever driven a car more delicately balanced on the open road. Admittedly, at a track day on fast circuits, a standard Elise could be found wanting, but surely if there was a point to the Elise, it was to make a small, affordable car that would dazzle on the open road, and not one to mix it with Porsches and Ferraris on track?

The modest performance and lack of mass meant you could drive up to and beyond the limits of the tyres’ adhesion with total confidence, because if it ever did let go, any rotation from the mid-engined package was clearly telegraphed and pleasingly progressive. It truly was a sports car for the people, one that didn't demand the skills of Nigel Mansell yet would satisfy even the most experienced driver.

It was an eye-opening drive back to London. By the time I arrived, I knew the Elise was something special, the likes of which I had never experienced before – and haven’t since. It had a purity and sense of purpose that was revelatory – yet it cost less than £20,000. Little wonder it’s the car that, famously, had senior people from Caterham Cars clutching their heads and uttering prophecies of doom as they immediately recognised that it was the package the ill-fated 21 could never hope to be.

If you haven’t driven an early, standard Elise, I would urge you to beg and borrow your way into one. Its lightness and strength showed how cars could be surprisingly efficient. Two cars have since come along that have showed a similar commitment to the issue of overweight cars – Renault’s Alpine A110 and Gordon Murray Automotive’s T.50. And as we are forced into the realm of electric cars, we are unlikely to ever see something as thought-provoking as the original Elise again.

It’s also that car that knocked-out Romano Artioli stone cold. During preparations for an internal presentation at Lotus, one rolled off a display stand and the A-pillar connected with Artioli’s head on its way down the ramps, producing plenty of claret and prompting one panicked PR man to rush across the room to cries of “Oh my God, Artioli’s dead!”. But that’s another story…

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