We have it on good authority that years ago, a current member of the Roundel staff once had the idea to mate a Lotus Europa Series 2 body with a BMW Formula 2 engine and transaxle setup, and thereby create a light, powerful sports car that could out-handle and out-accelerate almost anything else on the road.
That never happened.
More recently, another car nut had a similar idea. In this case, he wanted to stuff a V10 engine from a BMW M5 into the body of a Lotus Exige, thereby creating a light, powerful sports car with amazing acceleration and the type of handling that made Lotus famous.
Apparently that did happen. We’ve seen the video.
From the formative years of Colin Chapman’s company, Lotuses have been small, light—sometimes very, very light—cars that handled extremely well. They often came with engines that lacked an abundance of power. To say they were anemic would have been an understatement. The 82-horsepower Renault 16 motor in the Europa was one example. The small Toyota engines in the more recent Lotuses continued that tradition. The power never seemed to rise to the level of the car’s handling, and only the Lotus’s legendary lightness made the car’s acceleration tolerable.
Meanwhile, BMW has been cranking out great cars for years, but its middle name is Motor, and it also has built great engines that powered more than just BMW cars. In Formula 1, Brabham, ATS, Arrows, Benetton, Ligier, Williams, and Sauber have produced racecars propelled by BMW engines. The March-BMW Formula 2 cars were legendary. The McLaren F1 was for a time the fastest production car in the world and the racing version won Le Mans. McLaren F1s were powered by BMW V12 engines.
So why not a BMW-powered Lotus?
The S85 V10 that propelled the E60 BMW M5 was more than enough engine for the two-ton M car. With 500 horsepower and 380 pound-feet of torque it could push the M5 from zero-to-60 mph in just over four seconds, and also give it a top speed of 205 miles per hour, once the electronic limiter was de-limited.
What if that engine were stuffed into a mid-engine car that weighed only 2,000 pounds; a car that could already do zero-to-60 in about the same time as the M5, but with half the M5’s horsepower?
It appears someone has done just that. Videos have surfaced on the Internet showing what looks like an S58 V10 crammed into a Lotus Exige. One video shows a BMW-powered Exige being started and backed into a garage, purportedly in Sweden. Another video shows a similar Exige but with a different exhaust configuration starting at that same Swedish garage but then driven on the street in a somewhat lively manner.
Mid-engine Lotuses—even with low-horsepower motors—were susceptible to trailing-throttle oversteer, meaning that if they were not handled deftly, they could swap ends before the driver knew what was happening. If a BMW V10-powered Lotus’s weight was distributed properly, and the short-wheelbased car’s driveline could handle the extra power and torque, and the car was controllable—all big ifs—it might be awesome, and it could be the realization of the Lotus-with-enough-power dream.
Someone named Hennessey had already stuffed a monster motor into a Lotus. Hennessey Performance Engineering installed a 1,244-horsepower, twin-turbocharged, seven-liter GM LS2 V8 into a Lotus Exige and called it the Hennessey Venom GT. It set a number of straight-line speed records, such as the fastest production car from zero to 186 mph (13.63 seconds), and zero to 200 mph (14.51 seconds). In 2014, one model of the Venom GT reached 270 miles per hour.
The Hennessey Venom GT version of the Lotus Exige is impressive, but it was all about straight-line speed. We’d like to see the BMW V10-powered Lotus turned loose on the road—or better yet, the track—to see if can be a truly roadable car, and how it might measure up against other powerful, great-handling sports cars.
We know the car can move under its own power, both in the driveway and on the street.
Here are those videos.
The conversion was documented with many photos, many of which can be found at this link:
http://www.carbuildindex.com/35917/monster-lotus-exige-build-with-bmw-m5-v10-engine-swap/
The car sounds great and looks promising. Clearly, the addition of a BMW engine gives the car the power and character not normally seen in a factory Lotus product.
We would love to see video of this car on the track, so that our poor staffer with the crazy BMW-powered Lotus Europa scheme can see how the story could have ended.—Scott Blazey
[Photo and video courtesy of Erik Zackrisson.]
