Although Lotus was founded in 1952 with a £25 loan from founder Colin Chapman’s girlfriend (and later wife) Hazel, Lotus was on top of the world by 1970. The company moved into a shiny new factory at Hethel in 1966, went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1968, and won its third and fourth Formula 1 world championships in 1968 and 1970. Although they were going toe to toe with the world’s most prestigious race car builders like Ferrari at the world’s highest level of motorsport, their road cars were…still available as kits.

It was time to take Lotus road cars upmarket and the Esprit was the car that did it. Combining world class Italian design by Giorgetto Giugiaro’s firm Italdesign, with the innovative engineering of Lotus, the Esprit offered performance and prestige that made the car appealing not just to fringe motorsport nuts, but to the more mainstream car enthusiast too.

In this video, Derek TamScott explores the genesis of the Esprit and offers his driving impressions of this beautiful 1977 Series 1 Esprit. Learn more about this Esprit here: https://www.otsandco.com/project/1977...

About OTS
OTS is a boutique collector car brokerage firm that specializes in cars that are interesting to enthusiasts. The OTS founding team has been immersed in the specialty car world since we were quite literally children. That means we have decades of experience even if it may not look like it. Our mission is to leverage that experience to our clients' benefit, whether that's getting top dollar when selling their car or finding the car that makes every outing an experience in all the right ways.

We started this company to integrate all our years of specialty car experience to serve our clients and we pride ourselves on our knowledge and our transparency. We believe there’s an art to marketing cars properly; we enjoy telling their stories and feel privileged to be able to share them with the world.