The Drive Cult garage welcomes Alastair Preacher's S1 Lotus Elise. In his first report, he's got some hard figures on how much it costs to run this modern classic.
Microsoft Excel is not generally exciting, and before today it hasn't been particularly scary. However, I did something silly today involving MS Excel and I am slightly scared. The cause? A fully populated spreadsheet of all the work done on my Lotus Elise since I bought it, including mileage, details of what was done and most importantly, the cost.
There were 3 good reasons for doing this:
- At heart I'm an inquisitive and data-hungry chap so sadly enough this sort of thing interests me. Some may find this odd.
- I also inherited a rather good file with the car which tracks all work done to date filed in date order. So I figured I should help keep this up. Not to mention that I wanted a back up in case I lost the original file. I think this is less odd.
- It's a Lotus.
Now, quite apart from the general reputational issues Lotuses suffer from, I had the feeling that my car was spending more than a normal amount of time at my local Lotus specialist (the excellent PSR Automotive), especially considering the fact that I've never taken it there with the express purpose of enhancing the car's performance, save purchasing a new set of tyres.
Now, with my spreadsheet, I have proof. But of what? I'm not actually sure if the Elise is an expensive car to run or not. Factually speaking, I've spent a good chunk of change, but I've also had a lot of preventative work done that is unlikely to need doing again soon. In any case, I thought it might be interesting to start a build and maintenance blog to give an idea of the running costs of a modern classic such as the Elise.
Hopefully, it will involve lots of shiny bits that make the Elise go faster. Hopefully there won't be too many numbers to the left of the decimal point. Hopefully my wife won't read this...
Before we get started, however, here's a potted history of the car. I bought the Elise from a friend back on 6th March 2010 with somewhere in the region of 46-47k on the clock. He was the second owner and under his care it had a well-loved but hard life on track (about 10 track days per year for 2-3 years). It's not exactly what you would call concours but its never wanted for anything in the mechanical and servicing departments. For some, the stone-chipped and rubber scuffed body is a turn-off; for me it's something to be done later, and sometimes I think the car looks all the better for it anyway.
The Elise is a Series 1 car, and one of the first 1,000 cars made. This means it has lighter aluminium uprights instead of the steel ones, a nice aluminium boot-lid instead of the later fibreglass one and much lighter AWI 5-spoke wheels (rare as hen's teeth and despite my best kerb-mounting spinning efforts, still unbuckled). This would suggest its generally a bit lighter all round, but honestly, my friend was just being a nerdy purist when he bought it.
It's still got the original K-series engine, but it has had quite a bit of work done and now sports a PTP 170ps kit, which gives the car around 160bhp. The kit includes a very high spec Vulcan cylinder head, ultimate fast road Piper cams and an ITG induction kit. The car also sports a Janspeed sports cat, Janspeed stainless sports exhaust and a replacement ECU by EFI. On top of all of that, the car now has a Piper cambelt and vernier timing wheels which were fitted at the last service before I bought it in November 2009, using timing figures provided by Piper's top man and Dave Andrews of DVA.
All of this go-faster stuff isn't actually where I would have start upgrading the Elise, so thankfully it's had some excellent work elsewhere too. The OEM ceramic composite disks have been replaced for EBC standard pattern ones, paired with Pagid RS4-2 pads all-round. The hoses have been upgraded to standard stainless steel affairs, which I'm very glad about since I'm told they're a royal pain in the backside to fit! It's currently running ATE Racing Blue Brake fluid, although I've had several variants over time, which will no doubt continue.
As is often the case on an Elise, it wears Yokohama Advan Neova tyres on all four corners, which are a pretty good fast road/track tyre, though do have issues in standing water when the tread is worn, unsurprisingly! However, the Elise could definitely run softer rubber on the fronts as the current set are well past their use-by date but still have plenty of tread left (more on this at a later date).
On the suspension side, it has Nitron NTR track shocks with 325/400 springs. When I bought it, it was set to a full 340R track geo, lowered to around 110 front, 115 rear with all of the work completed to a very high standard, including fitting steering rack riser plates to reduce the bump steer caused by lowering the car. At some point I'll come back to these figures since I've now tweaked them but can't recall exactly what I've tweaked them to! That's minus 10 internet car geek points for me.
Onto some more miscellaneous items; a particular favourite of mine is that the car is fitted with an Eliseparts uniball toe link kit. OK, I lied. I doubt I'd notice if it didn't have that. More importantly, the car does have a proper 82 degree remote thermostat and has had the coolant pipes re-routed to avoid the infamous head gasket issues that the K-series engine suffers from. I'm led to believe that there are a number of cheaper alternatives for this issue (particularly on the early cars for which you can't buy upgrade kits), but the last owner tried to go for the best possible option, including having bespoke piping made, to get it done correctly. I'll admit that I'm still slightly paranoid about head gasket problems, but there's little more I can do to prevent them so I won't lose sleep over it.
Finally, the Elise sports upgraded HID headlights, an S2 wiper blade (believe me, the original version is totally useless) and has had the stack dash glass replaced. Oh and it has a fairly decent Sony head unit, which is utterly pointless and has lived in my shed for the last year since I can't hear it over 40mph, let alone when pressing on.
The spec wouldn't be complete without a quick list of problems features. After all, it is a Lotus!
- For some reason the early cars have a tendency to look like they are using a lot of coolant when they aren't: if you fill the header tank up to the right level then it pretty quickly loses a bit of coolant after some driving, so the level looks low and you get very worried. If you leave it like that then the level doesn't change, but top it up again and the level drops once more. THe previous owner did some research and a lot of head scratching, and the answer, in classic Lotus fashion, was: "It's an early S1, they all do that, sir."
- In a similar vein, the temperature sender for the dashboard has earthing issues and gives an inconsistent reading to the dash unit, so you get paranoid that the temperature is fluctuating all over the place. Again, the answer was "They all do that, sir". Despite these assurances, my friend went to town with the cooling (as outlined above) and now the engine runs at a consistent 82 degrees regardless of what the gauge says - or so I'm told...
So, what next? Well, when I bought it, the 'to do' list stretched about as far as the next service. I did have some hankerings for new seats, harnesses and maybe a Honda conversion at some point, so let's see how those aspirations play out. Here are the raw figures on the costs since I've owned the car:
Original purchase price: £9,500
2010 maintenance cost: £1,500.44
2011 maintenance cost: £1,489.11
I find it hard to estimate the current value but I think it's unlikely to be less than £9,500. S1 cars have held their value pretty well, so let's be optimistic and assume £0 depreciation.
Total Mileage: 5,441
2010 Mileage: 2,326
2011 Mileage: 3,115
Total servicing cost per mile: £0.55
2010 cost per mile: £0.65
2011 cost per mile: £0.48
I'll explain in a later post why I don't think these figures are too bad, given the work that's been carried out. That said, I'm hoping future expenditure will be significantly less, or at least that any money spent will go on shiny go-faster parts.