Speedmonkey goes to Lotus Cars

You might have noticed on Twitter that I visited Lotus Cars yesterday.  The Lotus factory is up at Hethel, near Norwich, and was bought in 1966 by Colin Chapman as somewhere he could build and test the race and road cars in one place.

So as well as the factory Lotus has its own 2.2 mile test track on the old Hethel airfield runway.

I took mini-Speedmonkey (my son) along and we were treated to a factory tour, a slap up lunch and a good thrash round the track in a Lotus Exige S Roadster.

Lotus is officially the friendliest car company I've ever met.  There's a real family feel around the place. I'll publish a track test of the Exige and a wider Lotus article about the business, the factory and the cars next week.

For now here's a video I filmed.  It's two laps of the track with me in the passenger seat and Lotus' development driver talking us round the circuit.

Matt Hubbard