This is an Evante Sports, it’s a car you might never have seen before, it might also look strangely familiar. It’s the result of a motorsport engineering company in England deciding that they were going to build a better Lotus Elan, and then actually doing it.
Power is provided by an advanced 1.7 liter Vegantune Type A four-cylinder engine, and power is sent to the rear wheels via a 5-speed gearbox. It rides on a custom tubular steel backbone chassis, with four-wheel independent suspension, and it weighs just 720 kgs (1,587 lbs).
Fast Facts: The Evante Sports
- The Evante Sports was created by George Robinson’s Vegantune operation as a thoroughly re-engineered alternative to the Lotus Elan. Although visually similar, it used a new tubular steel backbone chassis, independent double-wishbone suspension, Ford Sierra drivetrain parts, four-wheel disc brakes, and a stronger glassfiber body.
- Power came from Vegantune’s own Type A twin-cam engine, developed after Lotus Twin Cam production ended. Using a Ford Kent-based bottom end with a new aluminum cylinder head, the engine initially displaced 1.6 liters before becoming a 1.7 liter unit in 1988, producing 140 or 160 bhp.
- Production began in 1986 after several years of delays, with 40 cars completed during 1987 alone. The lightweight 720 kgs Evante offered excellent performance, including a claimed 0 to 60 mph time of 6.4 seconds, but high pricing, the classic Elan market, and new rivals contributed to its downfall.
- The 1988 Evante Sports shown here has the 1.7 liter Vegantune engine and Ford Sierra-sourced 5-speed manual gearbox, plus adjustable coilovers and a performance cylinder head. Finished in metallic green over Bone leather with walnut trim, it shows 30,790 miles and it’s currently offered for sale in Queensland, Australia.
History Speedrun: The Evante Sports
Between late 1986 and 1991, a 14 man workshop on the edge of the town of Spalding in Lincolnshire, England built 106 examples of a sports car that looked almost exactly like a Lotus Elan, and yet shared almost no parts at all with one. The Evante was the work of George Robinson, a man who had spent 20 years servicing, tuning, and rebuilding Elans, and who eventually concluded that the only way to fix the car’s faults was to engineer a new one from the ground up.
The Evante was unveiled to the world in October of 1982 at a planned price of £9,750 in kit form, with production scheduled for the following spring at one car a week. Image courtesy of Evante Cars Ltd.
Robinson knew his way around high-performance car design, he had built Grand Prix cars at BRM in the early 1960s, the era of Graham Hill’s 1962 World Championship, before opening Vegantune at Cradge Bank, just outside Spalding, in 1965. The firm became a leading tuner of the Lotus Twin Cam for Formula 3 and Formula B, supplying engines that were raced by the likes of James Hunt, Jacky Ickx, Alan Jones, and Tom Pryce, and preparing Alan Mann’s competition Ford Escorts.
The 1973 Oil Crisis gutted the racing trade, so Robinson leaned into road-car work, and in 1975 Lotus contracted Vegantune to build the Ford-based Twin Cam on its behalf, chiefly for Japan-bound Caterham Sevens. Roughly 300 engines had been supplied by 1978 but Lotus retired the Twin Cam for good at the end of the decade.
The Vegantune Type A
After the Twin Cam work dried up, rather than lose the business, Robinson developed his own engine. As you do. The Vegantune Type A was the result, it kept Ford’s 225E “tall block” Kent bottom end and added an all-new aluminum twin-cam cylinder head that drew on designs like the Cosworth BDA, with a toothed belt replacing the Lotus chain drive and improvements to the ports, valves, cooling, and oil circulation. It was a better engineered motor than the Lotus Twin Cam, and it made more power from the same displacement.
Breathing through twin Dell’Orto 40DHLA carburetors, the 1.6 liter unit made 140 bhp in standard tune, or 160 bhp with larger ports, high-lift camshafts, and compression raised from 8.5:1 to 10.5:1.
Caterham bought VTAs (Vegantune Type As), but quality control proved patchy, and once Cosworth’s more reliable BDR arrived in 1983 the bulk orders dried up. Only around 40 Sevens received the engine, and so Robinson decided to build it a car of his own.
Building A Better Elan
The Evante was unveiled to the world in October of 1982 at a planned price of £9,750 in kit form, with production scheduled for the following spring at one car a week. Robinson told Motor Sport magazine in 1982 that Elan owners were spending up to £10,000 on “what is still essentially a 15 year old car.”
The resemblance to the Elan was very much a deliberate choice – the doors were the same shape, the windscreen identical, and the pop-up-headlight arrangement was kept, though operated electrically rather than by vacuum in the interests of better reliability. Image courtesy of Evante Cars Ltd.
Evante Cars Ltd was incorporated in 1983, with local businessman Tony Elmer putting up capital and becoming a partner, but production didn’t get under way until September of 1986, more than three years behind the original schedule, and the first full year of production followed in 1987.
The resemblance to the Elan was very much a deliberate choice – the doors were the same shape, the windscreen identical, and the pop-up-headlight arrangement was kept, though operated electrically rather than by vacuum in the interests of better reliability.
Underneath sat an all-new backbone chassis fabricated from epoxy-coated steel tube, with double wishbones at each corner in place of the Elan’s rear Chapman struts. The gearbox, differential, and constant-velocity driveshafts came from the Ford Sierra, finally banishing the Elan’s troublesome Metalastik doughnut couplings, while the switchgear was borrowed from the Escort and the tail lights from the Triumph TR7. Girling 10 inch disc brakes were fitted at all four corners.
The body was laid up from woven glassfibre cloth rather than mat, double-skinned around the bulkheads, doors, and windscreen surround, and foam-filled for some additional crash protection. Inside were Connolly leather Restall seats, a polished wood dashboard offered in walnut, oak, or teak, and a 64 liter foam-filled Explosafe fuel tank mounted above the differential.
Early cars used the 1.6 liter VTA and from January of 1988 capacity was standardized at 1.7 liters or 1,699cc, giving the same 140 bhp at 6,500 rpm with 129 lb ft of torque at 3,000 rpm in the standard 140TC, and 160 bhp in the uprated Evante 160.
Evante publicist Graham Arnold (formerly the sales manager at Lotus) liked to point out that the 160’s power-to-weight ratio of around 200 bhp per tonne split the Porsche 944 Turbo and the Ferrari Testarossa. The factory claimed a curb weight of 720 kgs (1,587 lbs), 0 to 60 mph in 6.4 seconds, and a 132 mph top speed.
Production, Collapse, And The Zetec Afterlife
Mike Cotton, testing the Evante for Motor Sport in early 1988, judged it “a wonderful reincarnation of Colin Chapman’s best-loved product.” He reported that 40 cars were built in 1987, 26 of them exported, with type approval secured for Japan and Germany and a tax-paid British price of £14,887.70.
This is an Evante Sports, it’s a car you might never have seen before, it might also look strangely familiar. It’s the result of a motorsport engineering company in England deciding that they were going to build a better Lotus Elan, and then actually doing it.
That money bought a very good secondhand Elan Sprint at the height of the classic car boom, and buyers knew it. Mazda’s MX-5 arrived in 1989, the same year Lotus revived the Elan name on the front-wheel-drive M100, and Evante Cars failed in 1991 with 106 cars built.
Fleur de Lys, a Newark company known for vintage-styled delivery vans, acquired the design and built an Evante Mk2 with a wider body, Ford’s 1.8 liter Zetec engine, and Volkswagen Golf tail lights. Nine were completed before Fleur de Lys closed its vehicle arm in 1994, after which the rights passed through Jeremy Snow’s Evante Sportscars.
If you can find one for sale, which is rarely easy, an original Evante Sports typically costs around half as much as a comparable Elan, and it’s hard to argue that it’s not the better car when you look them both over without the Lotus-heritage-rose-tinted-glasses on. Although I’m sure that having said that, I’m about to receive a number of rather heated emails from the Lotus faithful.
The Evante Sports 1700 Shown Here
This is a 1988 Evante Sports, it’s powered by a 1.7 liter Vegantune twin-cam inline-four, driving the rear wheels through a Ford Sierra-sourced 5-speed manual transmission. The seller notes that the car has been fitted with four-way adjustable coilovers and a Vegantune performance cylinder head.
This is a 1988 Evante Sports, it’s powered by a 1.7 liter Vegantune twin-cam inline-four, driving the rear wheels through a Ford Sierra-sourced 5-speed manual transmission. The seller notes that the car has been fitted with four-way adjustable coilovers and a Vegantune performance cylinder head.
The car is finished in metallic green over a Bone leather interior, with a walnut dashboard and matching timber trim. Equipment includes electric windows and an electric boot release, and it’s accompanied by its soft top and two ignition keys. Its odometer currently shows 30,790 miles, although the mileage is not warranted.
It’s now being offered for sale out of Sandstone Point in Queensland, Australia and you can visit the listing here if you’d like to read more or register to bid.
Images courtesy of Collecting Cars
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
