Adelaide's Graham Fraenkel decided to make a major change in his life last year. After being a big American muscle car person, he turned. Last year he test drove a Lotus Evora 400, which is 299kW in a 1395kg plastic car made by the company founded by university engineers Colin Chapman and Colin Dare.
Chapman made cars for private racers and encouraged them to enter big events. Early on he had the idea of selling cars as kits to avoid sales tax. Then came factory-put-together sports cars like the Lotus Elan that went fast but were made of parts from all sort of other makers, air-conditioning that never worked, soft tops that let more rain in when they were up and lots of reliability problems.
But this was the company that saw Stirling Moss win in Monaco, won seven constructor's championships and had more financial challenges than America's big retailers. So, Graham, a medical specialist, fell in love and in March, Zagame Adelaide delivered his car. That's when the problems started. The gearbox and drive train have been weird and still haven't been fixed despite being back to Zagame three times for a total of more than five weeks.
I wrote to the Lotus media people in Sydney and to Nick Ray, the warranty general manager, and asked for their comments of Graham's issues. There was no response but Richard Gibbs, the Lotus chief operating officer, rang me later to say the company was talking to Graham and the problems were being sorted.