You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Fix a Crashed Lotus Elise
Track driving is not for the faint of heart — or with those thin wallets. The likelihood that you and your car will take a hit is high, and the costs associated are always going to be on the expensive end. But the heart wants what it wants, and so long as you go in with your eyes open, the difficulty of a repair shouldn't deter you from buying your track weapon of choice — even if it's something rather exotic and hard to like a Lotus.
Fastx Autosport in San Marcos, Texas, is all too familiar with the costs associated with rebuilding a previously track-prepped, smashed-up Lotus Elise. The track-prep specialists, mid-engine experts, and driver coaching hub situated squarely between Austin and San Antonio has been developing a regular clientele of Lotus owners for the past five years. And when an Elise recently met its maker at Road Atlanta, Fastx Autosport's owner Kevin Fennell was the Lotus owner's first call for a full rebuild.
Fennell, a former oil field engineer and Canadian-turned-Texan, brought Fastx Autosport to life after purchasing a Lotus Exige in 2014. The Lotus in his driveway garnered a neighborly invitation to Harris Hill Raceway, Fennell's local course, and track driving became a regular facet of his life shortly thereafter. He spent two years in his garage and the following three building up his shop in San Marcos, attracting Lotus customers from across the country. It's not just crash repair that Fastx Autosport focuses on, either: check their YouTube channel and you'll see the likes of a twin-turbo, 1000-hp time-attack Exige, a number of ChampCar Miatas, and even an in-house wiring harness room.
We first learned about Fastx Autosport after a social media post of a crash at Road Atlanta went viral. Exiting corner 10b and cresting the ridge toward turn 11, a gnarly set of rumble strips appeared to unsettle the rear end of the Elise, sending the driver into the inside edge concrete wall headfirst at about 40 mph. The initial video clip shows the driver screaming a repeated expletive — we would be doing so as well — but Fennell told us that their customer was ultimately okay. Plus, the time and cost to repair his precious Elise track car weren't as cost-prohibitive as forum posts and Lotus exclusivity might lead you to believe.
"It was about 80 hours to do that job. Something around 15 hours to do the crash structure, 10 hours each to do the clams and get them quick mounted, and maybe five hours to get the roof quick mounted," Fennell told Road & Track.
The front-end damage was the primary problem, but the Elise had spun around and taken a rear-end hit, too. As a result, Fennell and the folks at Fastx Autosport elected to do a full rebuild. Replacing the front-end crash structure was first on the list. Lotus uses a fiberglass body structure under the front end of its Elise lineup, a decided departure from the likes of Toyota and Ford, but it's not actually that expensive to buy. Fennell said the price for a new crash structure from Lotus came out to $3000. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the price of buying and tracking an Elise these days.
What was difficult, however, was the way Lotus attached the crash structure to the chassis. Instead of bolting it in like any other automaker, Lotus primarily uses glue to fix its safety brace, meaning Fennell and his team had to cut the damaged one out and grind out all the adhesive first. Then came the painstaking process of inserting the new structure. Glue remains a critical component in reassembly, but Fennell said the glue itself isn't very tacky; it takes precision, temporary rivets, and a patient touch to get it sitting right.
"We mocked everything up, checked all the alignment, got the new crash structure in, mounted it up with Rivnuts, figured out where it had to sit, and then used the special two-part glue to put it back on in that position," Fennell said. "From there, it was just a matter of putting body panels back on."
It's here where the story starts to get expensive. Factory body panels for most Lotus models remain available, but the price per panel can be as high as $10,000. This particular client needed to replace his Elise's front and rear clamshells, meaning the carbon fiber body panel bill would have run upwards of $18,000. ("Simplify and add lightness" ain't cheap.) However, Fannell found a workaround for his client in the form of aftermarket, race-ready panels that cost around $7000 total. Using quick-release latches, the rebuilt Elise can have its front end off in a matter of seconds — ideal for quick track-side fixes or future crash repair.
Even after all the fixes and upgrades — on guidance from Fannell, the Elise owner went on to upgrade his aerodynamics and add a supercharger — but one piece of the damaged Elise remained. Both doors took minor hits during the crash, but repairing an Elise door is perhaps the most annoying part of all.
"Man, you have to really want your door repaired on a Lotus. Everything is glued to the inside of it," Fannell said. "So if it gets hit and one of those glue panels breaks off, trying to get the alignment back so that you know the window, latch, and hinge works, the mirrors in the right spot, and so you can mount the door back on the car in the right spot is kind of beyond what most people would want to pay for and maybe even what we could do here."
Beyond the host of power and aerodynamic upgrades applied to this Elise, the total parts cost of rebuilding a nearly totaled Elise ran the client about $10,000, plus 80 hours of labor on top of that. We're not here to say that five figures of repair are affordable, but it's akin to the inflated repair costs associated with an insurance claim for a pedestrian commuter car these days. While the bodywork can be understandably expensive, Lotus's long-held partnership with Toyota parts and generous engine bay arrangement is a significant reason why even a mechanical rebuild isn't bank-breaking; gear sets, engine parts, and even odd-ball interior parts are all stocked by your local Toyota dealership.
"Those parts that are glued on are incredibly difficult to work on. Then on the counter side, the parts that you can take off make it very easy to work on. On my personal race car, you could be standing in the engine bay in a minute and a half and have every piece of bodywork off the entire rear end of the car," Fennell said.
"The reason I like working on the Lotuses is that you can kind of figure out anything to do in them. You have this chassis, but inside the chassis, there's this big open space to have the engine and the engine bay, so it gives you some freedom to put different drive trains in and different kinds of plumbing layouts and so on. You're not restricted so much by the car."
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