Ferrari Mailing List: LA Times review of Lotus Exige and Porsche 911 (997) GT3

[Dennis Liu (bigheaddennis]

http://www.latimes.com/classified/automotive/highway1/la-hy-neil25apr25,0,39
52105,full.story?coll=la-home-highway1

>From the Los Angeles Times
RUMBLE SEAT / DAN NEIL
Go, speed racers, go
Lotus, Porsche flaunt their latest European power plays: street legal, if
not streetwise.
DAN NEIL

April 25, 2007

ONE is British, the other German. The Brit is a 1-ton, mid-engine atomic
pixie stripped to the bare metal floor, a car so loud and raw that when its
220-horsepower supercharged four is at - how to put this delicately? - full
suck, it sounds like an Oreck vacuum cleaner has taken up residence in your
helmet. The German is almost exactly a half-ton heavier, a winged,
ground-skimming vampire with a 415-hp, 3.6-liter flat six stuck in its
keister. The sound of this engine is breathtaking, biblical, deeply
sinister, like a two-man logging team cutting down the Tree of Knowledge.

If you think low polar moment has to do with melting ice caps, these cars
are not for you. These cars are turnkey club racers, factory-prepped
competition cars that you can drive to the track, hot lap and drive home on
what's left of the tires. They are toys, although in general lethality, more
in line with those made by General Dynamics than Mattel.

These cars - the Lotus Exige S and the Porsche 911 GT3 - belong to an
esoteric subset of performance cars: stripped down, tweaked to the gills,
barely legal. You could count among them the Lamborghini Gallardo
Superleggera and the Ferrari F430 Challenge Stradale. How barely legal? The
Exige S has a rear-view mirror - for purposes of Department of
Transportation approval - but you can't see anything because the rear canopy
is filled with the enormous intercooler.

Road cars are compromised. The steering is slower, more assisted and more
self-centering. The springs and shocks are softer. The cabins are packed
with heavy, noise-dampening insulation.

In the Exige S and the GT3, all that gets tossed like Imus Fan Club buttons.
The Porsche has a stall-happy, dual-mass flywheel and a towering,
leg-wearying pedal to engage it. Getting into the tiny, low-slung Lotus is
like climbing into a desk drawer. Both cars have hair-trigger steering. A
good sneeze can send you across three lanes of traffic.

These cars remind me of an O. Henry short story that was never written: A
man, seeking revenge, gives his mortal enemy a gift of one of these cars -
free, no questions asked. The only condition: He has to pick it up in
Baltimore and drive it home. On second thought, it's more like Stephen King.

But at the track? They're bliss, perfection, automotive Orgasmatrons. 

The $60,815 (base price) Exige S - the new supercharged version replacing
the soft-on-power Exige - is an elementary particle in sports-car physics:
No power steering, no stability control and no adaptive damping to sooth the
cat-o'-nine-tails sting of its suspension. The $106,860 GT3 - a lightened
and tightened version of the 997 with the naturally aspirated engine set to
kill - is more sophisticated: It has variable-rate power steering, traction
control and adaptive damping. But what the Porsche giveth in terms of
civility - alcantara seats and optional DVD-based navigation, for instance -
it taketh away in protective overrides. Unlike standard 911s, the GT3
doesn't come with stability control; tease this rear-engine dragon's
sliding, opposite-lock limits and you may find yourself going backward in a
major hurry. 

You could not ask for two unalike cars to be more alike. For example, both
lunge - and that's the only word for it - to 60 mph in about 4 seconds. Both
scream red-faced arias up to 8,500 rpm, and both reach peak torque at 5,500
rpm. Both use hand-stirred gear sets - in fact, these are two of the
quickest production cars in the world that still use a conventional
six-speed manual gearbox (another is the Porsche Turbo). Both come shod with
race tires (Yokohama ADVAN A048s for the Lotus, Michelin Pilot Sport Cups
for the Porsche) that are stickier than a House subpoena. Both have
adjustable suspensions: The Lotus has one-way adjustable Eibach/Bilstein
coil-overs and rear anti-roll bar, while the GT3's whole geometry can be
tuned (camber, toe, ride height and roll stiffness). Both have race-proven
brakes: Brembos for the Lotus and, on our test GT3, Porsche's full-on land
anchors, the optional ceramic composite brakes.

Oddly, both brands' American operations are based in Atlanta. How weird is
that? 

And both claw the air in search of track-holding downforce and
radiator-cooling breezes with wings, splitters, intakes - a dog's breakfast
of scoops and aero-foils. The Exige S generates 100 pounds of downforce at
90 mph. The GT3's biplane rear wing is adjustable and includes a Gurney flap
on the trailing edge of the deck lid. Top speed is a brisk 193 mph.

To paraphrase Bill Murray, what we have here are two heavily armed
recreational vehicles.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the Lotus Exige S to Willow Springs - thank
you, Los Angeles Shelby American Automobile Club - and it was just
phenomenal. Once I got there. I barely survived the 90-minute beating
delivered by the Exige S's spine-zinging, concussive ride. Sweet suffering
Jesuits!

Then I pulled onto the Streets of Willow circuit and it got all better.

Many words have been spilled trying to describe Lotus' distinctive handling,
of which the Exige S is the best example yet. Low and wide-stanced, the car
has its roll centers deep in the Earth. Being that it's a mid-engine car on
a 90.5-inch wheelbase, with a 38/62 front/rear weight bias, you'd expect it
to snappishly oversteer (translation: that it would fishtail abruptly).
Instead, the Lotus' deeply neutral handling - and the seamless transitions
provided by the progressive-rate Eibach springs - allows you to trail-brake
like crazy, rotate the car and, as it points toward the apex, get right back
on the gas. This car lives for slip angles. No car, anywhere, has such
confidence-inspiring cornering poise.

The steering - and the comically small steering wheel - that seems so
nervous on the road is perfect on the track: light, quick and laser
accurate. The aluminum-cased gearbox that seems clunky and unrefined on the
street now slips between ratios like a greasy knife. The pedals are close
and easy to heel-and-toe.

The no-profile Yokohama gumball tires that beat your brains out on the
street now seem like magic. It would have been tempting to load this car up
with monster tires whose lateral grip would overwhelm the chassis; instead,
Lotus matched the tires perfectly, and when this car is in its fervid,
opposite-lock moments, it's as much fun as driving an old British sports car
on bias plies.

Howling and hissing like a Harrier just inches from your head, the
Toyota-built 1.8-liter engine is supercharged - 30 hp more than the standard
Elise - and chipped so that 80% of maximum torque (165 pound-feet at 5,500
rpm) is available at just 2,000 rpm. Put the power down mid-corner and the
Exige S digs like crazy (our test car had optional traction control, but
it's almost completely transparent). Punchy, lively, free-revving, this
twin-cammer has a cute trick: It provides a two-second overboost,
temporarily raising the redline from 8,000 to 8,500 rpm. This came in handy
at the end of Street's single longish strait heading up the hill to Turn 2.

Our test Exige S had a few domesticating features, including air
conditioning and the optional Touring pack, which included electric windows
(useful) and a stereo (useless). With all that, the car weighed about 2,100
pounds, I'd estimate.

The GT3 comes at the performance equation from another angle, starting life
as a rather plush GT and simplifying. Gone are the back seats, the sound
insulation in the headliner and about 100 other odds and ends. Added are a
dry sump lube system and all manner of exotic engine internals to make the
reciprocating parts lighter and faster. Redline is a ferocious 8,400 rpm
(although it looks like 8,500 from the cockpit) and specific power is an
astonishing 115.2 hp/liter. With variable induction geometry and stepless
variable valve timing, the 3.6-liter just vomits howling gouts of German
horsepower in every gear. I rather like that.

The beautifully balanced GT3, obviously, has higher absolute limits than the
Exige S, more bite on turn-in and more lateral road holding from its huge
19-inch tires. If you put the adjustable suspension in Sport mode, the car
gets very racy and non-elastic, which can provoke it to skip and trammel in
corners over less-than-perfect pavement. Too much of that and the car's
computer will revert to the more compliant damper settings. The steering is
massively heavy but has superb feedback. The variable-ratio algorithm means
that the further off-center you turn, the more direct the steering response
becomes, but the effect is so subtle I didn't detect it. 

I don't love the pedal arrangement in the GT3. To heel-and-toe the
accelerator, the brake pedal has to be pushed down pretty far, and with the
ceramic brakes, that means gonzo, 10-tenths braking, which can take you out
of your driving rhythm, not to mention hang you from the seat belts.

New for this year's GT3 is standard traction control. With its sky-high
thresholds, the system allows lots of power-on oversteer and won't step in
unless you well and truly spool the tires. The more adventurous can switch
off traction control.

Unlike the hero-making Exige S, the GT3 is likely to leave you feeling
slightly humbled. There's a lot of car here. Getting the most out of it
would require many laps and a dozen sets of tires (at $1,500 a set). Still,
it's one of the half-dozen greatest track cars ever to host a license plate.

Had enough yet? If not, Lotus offers the track-only, non-DOT Exige Cup, with
an additional 37 hp ($86,190). Porsche offers the GT3 RS, a weight-shaved
street-legal racer with a rear wing the size of a coffee table ($123,200).
Prepare to have your face melted.

As the saying goes: Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?

*


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dan.neil [at] latimes.com

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2007 Lotus Exige S 

Base price: $60,815

Price, as tested: $64,855

Powertrain: Mid-mounted supercharged and inter-cooled 1.8-liter DOHC inline
four cylinder with variable valve timing; six-speed manual transmission;
rear wheel drive

Horsepower: 220 hp at 8,000 rpm

Torque: 165 pound-feet at 5,500 rpm

Curb weight: 2,077 pounds

0-60 mph: 4 seconds

Wheelbase: 90.5 inches

Overall length: 149.5 inches

EPA fuel economy: 23 miles per gallon city, 29 mpg highway

Final thoughts: Devil in a blue mini-dress

*

2007 Porsche 911 GT3

Base price: $106,860

Price, as tested: $120,735

Powertrain: Rear-mounted, naturally aspirated, horizontally opposed DOHC six
cylinder with variable induction and valve timing; six-speed manual
transmission; rear-wheel drive

Horsepower: 415 at 7,600 rpm

Torque: 300 pound-feet at 5,500 rpm

Curb weight: 3,031 pounds

0-60 mph: 4 seconds

Wheelbase: 92.9 inches

Overall length: 176.9 inches

EPA fuel economy: 17 miles per gallon city, 24 mpg highway

Final thoughts: Road & Track special edition