Quarter Mile
Everyone thought this test was going to be a gimme for the turbocharged MR2, but the Elise takes advantage of the less-than-ideal conditions and puts up a good fight. This test is not run at a drag strip. It's done in a pretty good headwind on the slightly uphill front straight of our home track, Streets of Willow, which sits at 2300 feet above sea level. Therefore, the results shouldn't be compared to other quarter-mile times, but used only as means to decide who ran quicker on this day.
The Elise has a hard time getting out of the hole. Clutch out and the engine bogs down.Traction control on, off, 7000rpm clutch-dumps; bog, bog, chirp and bog. Whoever programmed the drive-by-wire e-throttle was seriously not into smoky burnouts or drag racing. Brutally slipping the clutch works. With its low mass, the Elise rockets off the line pulling over one g up to the 20mph mark.
The A'PEXi Power FC ECU has no qualms with letting the MR2 roast the tires off the line. The acceleration graph shows that it pulls hard all the way through third gear. But then the boxy MR2 hits a bit of an aerodynamic wall at the bottom of fourth. This is not an issue for the sleek Lotus, which manages to clock a faster trap speed. But the MR2 crosses the finish line first, proving itself to be the superior drag racer. Which probably won't bother Lotus engineers one bit.
Braking
This test is run in the opposite direction as the quarter-mile test. So the cars are going slightly downhill with a tailwind, but it doesn't seem to hurt them too much. With their light weight, rear bias, race tires, and ABS, both cars perform exceptionally well. Either one would surely be rear-ended in an 80mph panic stop on the freeway.
The ABS engagement feels less refined in the Elise, like it's releasing the brakes for too long. The car lurches forward briefly then starts slowing again. You can see this on the braking graph at around the 70mph and 30mph marks. It only adds up to twelve feet more than the MR2, which has always been known for its phenomenal stopping distance, but that's enough for the Elise to lose in the third of three tests, leaving it with one last chance to beat our pesky Toyota.
Circuit
Driving the Elise on the track is an incredible experience. The rigid aluminum chassis is a near-perfect medium of communication between driver and tires. Most other cars are designed to isolate the driver from the road. Not this one. The non-power assisted steering is delightfully heavy. You can really feel how hard the front tires are grabbing. Its ability to turn in and transition from one direction to the other is amazing. Wherever the front tires go, the rear tires follow along without even the thought of stepping out.
The handling of the Elise would be perfect for a new driver, driving at around eight-tenths. But for someone who likes to get the car a little sideways and power through the corners, more front-end grip would be really nice. That could easily be fixed.
The MR2 is a whole different animal. The rear end is constantly wagging from side to side and has to be chased with a lot of countersteering. We're forced to brake for Turn One so the car will be stable in the braking zone for the Turn Two hairpin. The MR2's instability costs it time in the other high-speed corners as well. But in the low-speed sections it works great. Easing off the throttle rotates the back end.
Then the surprising, nearly instantaneous throttle response of the XS turbo set-up slings the car out of the corners and down the straights. That said, if you drive an MR2, please leave a little toe-in at the rear. Beyond making the car scary and dangerous, the toe-out makes the car slower overall.
The results are almost too close to call. According to the telemetry, the Elise laps the 1.8-mile road course 0.008 of a second quicker than the MR2. One more gust of wind down the front straight and it could have gone the other way.
The Winner?
Although it won three of the four tests, it feels wrong to declare outright victory for Project MR2 Spyder. Sure, we've proved that you can take an MR2 street car and tune it to beat a bone stock Elise. But ask anybody who drove both cars at the Streets which car they'd rather go ten-tenths in, and without hesitation, the nod would go to the Elise. It's a proper, buttoned-down track car.
Our MR2 is quite literally something else.For those who revel in the white-knuckle excitement of not knowing what is just around the next corner, this car may be for you. And yet we were able to turn some impressive numbers as we hung on for dear life while sliding around the track.
Still, the purists among us crave the Lotus. About the only strike against it is its reluctance to step the tail out. On the street, that's a good thing, especially in a flyweight car with an aluminum frame.
If someone were to dedicate their Elise strictly to track duty, we suspect all the understeer could be dialed out with a simple alignment. Then with a Honda K-series swap kit available from Prototype Racing and dry carbon body panels available from Lotus Sport, that someone could easily build an Elise we wouldn't even consider taking down. Until such time, we will thumb our nose and chortle with glee whenever we glimpse an Elise from behind the pitted windshield of our grubby little runabout.
Reading the charts
All this time, we'd assumed the average reader understood what's going on with all these fancy graphics. We spend weeks slaving over them to make a 100 percent accurate representation of all the data we get at the track. We're starting to think otherwise. To start, each track is represented by a bird's-eye view of the track broken into color-coded sections, with the driving line scribed inside in red. Some sections have a little graphic box that compares a given stat like average speed or average lateral g, peak speed or peak lateral g, exit speed or even section time for the fastest flying lap.
On the bottom of the page is a speed trace and sometimes a lateral g trace of each car on its flying lap as it progresses through each different-colored section. These actually tell you the most about what's going on. You can figure out cornering speeds, braking ability and even see the points where we shift gears and mark which gear the car's in. Squiggly lateral g profiles also show how well the car has taken a set in a corner. Take the MR2, for example. The line is far more lethargic and erratic than the Elise's because the suspension wasn't stiff enough for the R-compound tires' grip, forcing the car to constantly bite and slip as the soft suspension rolled over and hit the bump stops. The Elise clearly has the lateral g advantage in a dynamic track situation on account of its weight and balance.
So that's the basics. This time we've added some new elements for such a tight battle. We put arrows in to represent each car when they finish each track segment. Side by side means a dead tie, while other sections show one car barely leading. The MR2 is faster in the straights and corner exit, while the Elise will enter a turn faster and eat up the esses better.
Just for visual kicks, we also overlaid the lateral g profile onto the track map. Using the raw data and fancy math, we projected the magnitude of the lateral loads at any given point of the track as a horizontal projection off the driving line, 90 degrees from the direction of travel. The scale is all relative, but it helps to visualize what's going on at any given moment. The areas colored dark orange are where the two cars' lateral loads overlap.