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GOLDEN OLDIE Lotus Carlton
Undercover hooligan
The Lotus Carlton was a controversial car when it was launched in 1990. Is its lasting notoriety justified?
The Lotus Carlton was first unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in 1989, a modified version of the Vauxhall Carlton launched three years earlier. It was well received, but just prior to its showroom debut in August 1990, all hell broke loose when the British press suddenly cottoned on to its existence. Road safety groups, the police and all kinds of rent-a-quote politicians condemned the car for the message its 176mph top speed was sending. RoSPA called it a “high-speed safety hazard” and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) called it “an outrageous invitation to speed”. However, on reflection it’s fair to say that much of the condemnation was sheer hypocrisy: even faster cars, such as the Lamborghini Diablo and Ferrari F40, were already on sale, but because the Lotus Carlton was a four-door family saloon, it was somehow regarded differently. Admittedly, in some respects it was different to its
limited stable of competitors, cars such as the BMW M5 and Mercedes-Benz 500E, in that its speed wasn’t limited to 155mph. And although, at the time, it was the fastest production car ever built in Britain, the only difference between it and, say, a Ferrari Testarossa was that you could transport four people and their golf clubs with ease. Whether or not they were golfers, there certainly was a lot of horsepower available to Lotus Carlton drivers: 377bhp of it, in fact, thanks to the major fettling that took place at the Norfolk factory that Lotus used to convert the car from a stock Vauxhall Carlton GSi 24v. Yes, that’s right: Vauxhall took complete cars off the production line in Rüsselsheim, Germany, transported them whole to the Lotus factory in Hethel, then set to work dismantling and reassembling them. Not exactly the most efficient way of doing things, perhaps, but knowing that craftsmen have rebuilt the car by hand only adds to its charm.
The cars were pretty much stripped back to the bone. The 3.0-litre engine was taken out and replaced with a 3.6-litre twin-turbocharged unit that not only upped the output to 377bhp at 5,500rpm, but also supplied a monstrous 415lb-ft of torque at 4,200rpm. This enabled the car to complete the 0-62mph sprint in just 5.4 seconds. Indeed, the Lotus Carlton could hit around 50mph in first gear and achieve 0-100-0mph in less than 15 seconds. This was almost unfeasibly fast for 1990 and it was a decade before another four-door saloon could match it for pace. The transmission also had to be significantly modified to accommodate the extra power driving the rear wheels, so Lotus fitted the same six-speed manual gearbox found in the V8- engined Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1. And as the work was being done by Lotus, that meant that
there were also wholesale changes to the suspension, including the adoption of an extra link on the standard semi-trailing arm at the rear, dampers with automatic self-levelling and, at the front, new Lotus-tuned MacPherson struts. One of the joys of the Lotus Carlton is that it’s a real Q car
(an unassuming-looking high-performance car), despite some fairly aggressive bodykit and aerodynamic side skirts, as well as 17Ð Lotus wheels – at least it looks aggressive now: back in the early 90s, it was pretty standard fare. The addition of a
how quick it still is driving | April / May 2011
The one thing that really stands out is
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