Lotus Exige Cup 260 Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Lotus Exige Cup 260
Prices: £45,950 – on the road
Insurance Group: 20
Emissions: 199g/km
Performance: Max Speed 152mph / 0-60mph 4.1s
Fuel Consumption: (urban) 23.7mpg / (extra urban) 43.5mpg / (combined) 33.2mpg
Dimensions: Length/Width/Heightmm 3797/1850/1149mm

CUP-TAIN CAVEMAN

Our Rating: 6.6 / 10

Want to take your track-day heroics to the next level? Lotus have just the car for the job. Steve Walker reports

Brutal performance and with more grip than Bruce Forsythe’s hairpiece, the Lotus Exige Cup 260 is a more ferocious incarnation of a track day legend. It might be hard work day in, day out, but there is no car with greater capability in this price range. Enough said.

Lotus sometimes appears to have only the most tenuous of grasps on the concept of leaving well enough alone and every car enthusiast can be eternally thankful for it. The Norfolk firm’s ongoing quest to perfect its stable of fearsome trackday weapons has brought us some of the most exhilarating driver’s cars on the planet. It’s as if, just when we think that we’ve seen the ultimate, no-holds-barred, super-focused version of the Elise or its Exige hard-top sibling, the Hethel boffins get itchy feet and indulge in another sustained bout of meddling. The result, invariably, is yet another new benchmark where one never appeared possible, a version with all its dials ratcheted right up to 11. The latest in the line is the latest model year Exige Cup 260.

The standard Lotus Exige is no shrinking violet. Even stiffer and more aggressive in its set-up than the soft-top Elise, it’s a car capable of exerting fearsome cornering forces. On its limit, it’s enough to make a driver feel as though his skeleton is about to spontaneously dislocate, reducing him to shivering blob in the footwell. The Exige is a devastatingly quick car but, as it transpired, not quick enough for Lotus. The engineers took its Toyota-sourced 189bhp VVT-i engine and added a supercharger to create the 240bhp Sport Exige Cup 240. Now the Exige could embarrass supercars costing two or three times more on the straight as well as round the corners but Lotus couldn’t resist making it a little bit quicker. Today, Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis venturing out on track have the Exige Cup 260 to contend with.

This model was first introduced for the 2009 model year but it’s now been improved further with the latest technologies introduced with the 2010 model year standard Exige. The most obvious tweaks in this respect are the styling ones. The lightweight, unpainted carbon chord composite rear wing is based on the design from the Exige GT3 road car concept shown at the Geneva Motorshow in 2007. It’s 181mm wider and mounted 46mm higher and 61mm further back than the wing used on the original version of this car, reducing drag. That’s also the goal of the restyled front end, which includes a larger, more angular air intake to help funnel more air through the radiator to improve the efficiency of the engine. Ahead of the front wheels on either side of the main aperture, two larger air intakes increase the airflow to the twin oil coolers. Horizontal vanes, made from lightweight carbon fibre bisect these oil cooler air-intakes to stabilise the airflow and further increase the cooling efficiency. Finally, mounted below the three air intakes is a new aerodynamic splitter.

The Exige Cup 260 is a development of the Cup 240 and Cup 255 models and like its predecessors, it’s designed very much for use on track. Power comes from the same 1,792cc variable valve timing and lift engine with supercharger that launched the 240 up the road in such a spectacular manner but here it’s up-rated to 257bhp. The power boost is achieved through a series of measures designed to improve the air-flow into the engine and the car feels even faster than before thanks to a series of weight-saving measures which have reduced its bulk down to just 890kg. The Exige trademark roof-top air intake is enlarged to feed the revised intercooler more effectively and a neatly designed air box allows it to flow freely into the combustion chamber. The fuel pump has also been redesigned to improve efficiency and deliver the maximum power output at the screaming peak of the rev range while a level 2 sports exhaust pro