What It Was Like Driving A Bright Orange Prototype Lotus During The UK’s COVID Lockdown

Early May, 2020. The UK was in a Covid lockdown that had started in March. We had all been isolating for two months, people traveling beyond their local areas were being stopped by police, and everyone I knew had been stuck in their homes for months unless they were queueing at their local shops for food. It was grim, even for those who weren’t ill and hadn’t lost anyone.

I’d been working from home for the first time, which meant making an office in the garage of the house we’d just moved into and getting on with some design work, while my future wife tried to cope with stressful boredom/uncertainty of being on furlough. I couldn’t have picked a better person to be locked up with; she’s great. She made me stop for tea breaks and meals and made the whole situation as fun as it could be.

She, of course, was locked in with a tedious psycho doing 12-hour shifts designing stuff she wasn’t allowed to see. It was a deeply weird time; as an example, back then at 8pm every Thursday we’d all open our front doors and applaud the NHS. Clapping from our houses for the staff working at hospitals miles away. I think the entire country had gone slightly mad.

[I’m Dave Larkman, former Lead Engineer of Powertrain Design at Lotus Cars. I spent 25 years doing extremely confidential work at Lotus for other OEMs, like GM and Nissan, and working on every Lotus product from the S2 Exige to the Emira. I also worked in Powertrain Research, where I got to engineer ingenious engines with 40:1 compression ratios or foot long titanium pistons. [Ed Note: Read Dave’s other pieces here. -DT] ]

This was my home office, great view if you like 90’s MTB parts, but not the best environment for designing the intake systems for what would become the Lotus Emira.

One of the most fun parts of my Powertrain Design Engineer job at Lotus was driving the cars. Sometimes to assess and diagnose issues, sometimes to run them in before testing (“Here, take this V6 Exige for the weekend, but you have to drive it gently and change gear every 15 seconds”), sometimes to give feedback, but mostly for validation mileage to prove there were no problems with whatever new thing they were trying out.

I love driving, and they were always great cars to drive, so I pushed hard to get the appropriate Lotus Driver Permit to let me drive test cars. The day I got my High-Risk Road and Track Permit was one of the best days of my life; all the begging, training, begging, experience and begging had been worth it.

But this was Covid lockdown, and I hadn’t been further than 4 miles from my house in months. Until I got a call.

There was a project deadline looming, they needed validation miles on a new thing, and the validation required long distance road driving. Would I mind leaving the house for a few hours after work, and maybe at the weekend, to add miles to a test car? Yes please! I was at the factory that evening showing my photo ID to security (while wearing a mask, because the entire country was slightly mad) to get the keys.

The procedure for picking up the car seems wildly paranoid now; the day shift driver would spray the entire interior with disinfectant, then wipe it all down with anti-bacterial wipes (I remember being mildly worried these weren’t anti-viral wipes) before they left the car. The next driver would repeat all that when they got in, and the fuel pumps at Hethel would also get a spray and a wipe before and after refueling.

So what was the car? My transport though the dystopian epidemic was a US-spec LHD Lotus Evora, with a supercharged 3.5 V6 making 400bhp, in bright orange.

For those of you not used to seeing UK licence plates: those aren’t UK licence plates. The red-on-white “Trade” plates are only to be used for transporting cars for motor trade use – normally it’s for customer test drives and new vehicle delivery, and you can’t park the car anywhere public as the car isn’t taxed, either. It’s a massively suspicious cherry on top of an already suspicious bright orange cake.

I’d felt pretty conspicuous driving four miles to work in my grey Toyota on the few occasions I was allowed to, and now I’m driving a literal high-visibility sign that I’m not staying local.

Lotus is/was based at Hethel in Norfolk, a rural bulge on the east coast of England about 100 miles North East of London. The test route was South down the A11 from Hethel to the A14, then East to the A12 and North along the coast, and finally West along the A47 back to base, about 150 miles a lap.

The A11 South from Hethel is the main road from Norfolk to everywhere else (there is nothing North or East of Norfolk unless you have a boat), and it’s busy. Well, normally. But for that first drive in lockdown it was totally deserted. I saw more deer on the road than I did other cars. Had I been in Jason’s Pao they would have immediately ganged up and pummeled the car to pieces.

The few other cars I did see were weird, too, because about half of them were the Police. You know that thing you do when you see a police car of trying not to look suspicious? Try that during a travel ban when you’re driving someone else’s bright orange sports car on moody licence plates.
As most of the route was dual carriageway (meaning there is a central barrier in the middle of the road), the Police going the other way weren’t much of a worry. I’d have to be pretty unlucky to pull on to the road near a Police car going my way, so I had my side of the roads mostly to myself at 70mph, with the occasional articulated lorry limited to 56mph to blow past. Luckily the test requirement was “drive normally” and not some weird combination of revs and load, or something. I’d stop at Hethel for refueling and to eat whatever food I’d brought with me, glug down a drink, then keep driving the route.

Ah, the route. I’d been stuck at home for months getting increasingly anxious, and now: now I could see the sea. The first time I saw it I pulled over, stared at the sea, and had a little cry. It was glorious. I sent everyone I knew a picture, and they were overwhelmingly not happy with me as a result.

This is the seaside town of Lowestoft, the most easterly place in the UK. Normally I wouldn’t even try parking here because it’d be packed with tourists, but it was totally deserted – deserted enough that I risked parking up on the trade plates for as long as it took to walk across the beach and skim some stones in to the North Sea. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

The testing went on for a few days, day shift would plough round the route until about 5pm, then after a hard day designing a zip tube or airbox I’d take over after bathing the car in disinfectant.

Eventually, of course, my luck ran out and I saw a police car coming up a slip road on the A14 half a mile behind me. Urgh. I’ve been stopped by the police before while driving my own cars, and while it’s mostly fine, the unpleasant stops had been very unpleasant, so I was experiencing a degree of dread. As he slowly caught up I tried to drive in the least suspicious way possible. Is 5mph under the speed limit more suspicious? Maybe confident low level speeding shows I’m not worried, or precise adherence to the limit shows I’m paying attention? I suspect it doesn’t matter when you’re in a bright orange sports car and the cops are bored, so I waited for the inevitable blue lights. He passed me, lit up a “follow me” sign in the rear window and lead me down off the main road to a deserted services.

He was unhappy that it was LHD, because it meant that he’d tapped on the wrong window after he’d pulled me over. Like I didn’t get in the wrong side of the car at least once a shift.

Anyway, tap tap tap on the window. I wind it down, and he asks what the hell I thought I was doing twatting around the country in a bright orange sports car on trade plates all day and all night. So I did what I was told never to do in the US when stopped by the police: I reached into the glovebox. I pulled out a folder and handed him the letter.

It was on Norfolk Constabulary headed paper, it explained that Lotus had permission for some mileage accumulation testing and authorised the bearer to be driving this particular bright orange car along this specific route as much as they liked. A more confident person might have felt a bit cocky at this point.

The nice policeman then told me there had been reports about the stupid orange sports car in the traffic police chat, and I think he was nearly as happy to get to the bottom of it as I was to have got my first ever Police stop while in company product out of the way, without getting arrested, points, a fine or a stern telling off.

But that wasn’t the only stop I needed to do, what with the 150 mile loop, the food and drink, and not being allowed to park in public places. Sometimes I needed to do things that only very senior Autopian staff would even consider doing in a car, and that meant getting to Hethel and using my security pass to get to a toilet, or, with just a very minor detour, popping to my house.

I live on a housing estate with several hundred other houses all crammed together on tight little roads, it’s great for echoing the sound of a noisy exhaust (sorry neighbours). It was like a public service, sure, I can’t take you all with me on my exciting trips to the sea, but I can bring you a noisy orange car to gawk at, so you can ask each other on the local Facebook group what kind of Lambo it is.

One evening I drove into the estate with the exhaust enloudener engine protection valve open so all the pops and bangs were going through the unsilenced 3” pipe, in Sport mode (of course) with the windows down so I could enjoy the noise, as usual. I designed that exhaust, and I thought it sounded pretty damn fantastic, and extremely loud for a road legal system. Then the weirdest thing happened: the front doors of all the houses opened, everyone came out, and gave me a round of applause.

I passed hundreds of houses, and every house had someone standing on the door step, clapping, as I drove slowly by. It felt magnificent. Like the slow down lap after winning a race, or every single drive if you’re royalty.

It was, of course, 8pm on NHS Thursday.

Top graphic image: Dave Larkman