Oh what a circus!

It has been a very long day at the Paris Auto Show, but I learned a few things of note; made some connections and managed to avoid getting a parking ticket although I parked in an outrageous fashion because I could not find a better option. And there’s the rub… The traffic getting into the show was absurd and as I sat in a jam for more than an hour and watched the tram scuttling by on its turf carpet, I wondered why it is that we have car shows. We have far too many cars in Europe as it is. Next time I go to the Porte de Versailles for a big exhibition, I guess I will go by tram…

I went to see what Group Lotus was up to and was left in wide-eyed awe at the money that was being spent, and at the cheek of those involved. Team Lotus and Group Lotus were separated from the very beginning in 1954 – so as to avoid one company hurting the other – and although each helped the other with reflected glory and technology – they were never one entity. So to claim all of Team Lotus’s victories as its own was, I felt, a pretty outrageous piece of piracy on the part of Group Lotus. That is an opinion that is not shared by others, but we are all entitled to our own views. To argue that Team Lotus is a brand that has not been used since 1994 and thus – miraculously – it should belong to Group Lotus, holds very little water in my mind. Anyway, that will sort itself out in courts of law, or in political lobbies in Kuala Lumpur.

Group Lotus billed the Paris Show as the dawn of a new era. And you cannot fault the ambition. Whether it will work or not is another matter: The company launched: “five new cars, two evolutions of existing models and a concept car. A sumptuous new magazine. A flashy new website. And a range of merchandise featuring not one, not two, but three separate clothing ranges”.

It will be several years before all of this comes on song (if indeed it ever does) but, for the record, there is a new 5-litre V8 Lotus Esprit which Lotus describes as “the ultimate supercar”; there is a new Elan, a new Elite, a new Elise and a four-door saloon called the Eterne. I was watching the event with the boss of another car company, who had come along to see whether all the rumours about Lotus were true. His reaction as each new model was unveiled? “This is the best smoke and mirrors job I have ever seen!”

He said he would believe it when the cars go into production. Turning out prototypes for car shows is relatively easy, putting the same cars into production is another matter.

I thought that was fair. From what I can gather, Dany Bahar, the new Lotus boss, got the job to run the company because he turned up with private investors (from Malaysia), willing to pay $450 million in the next three years to try to turn Lotus into a rival of Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche. Bahar is not a man who lets the grass grow under his feet. He has changed jobs with remarkable alacrity in recent year. He knows little of the car industry and yet he believes that he can beat them all at their own game. Well, good luck to him. Personally I think that Lotus buyers tend to come from a different segment of the market. One can alienate one’s traditional customers in the hope of convincing the supercar buyers that a Lotus is a good idea, but why would anyone splash out that kind of money on a Lotus, when you can get a new McLaren?

What else? There were new WRC cars from Ford, Citroen and Mini, but there was little F1 influence at the show, where the emphasis is very clearly on sustainable machinery. F1 is foolish if it ignores such a trend in the industry… There were a few interesting concept competition cars and all the latest road car stuff. Nothing to get really excited about. The most interesting car, as far as I was concerned was not one featuring astonishing technology, but rather interesting geography: the Mastretta MXT, from Mexico’s first homegrown car manufacturer…

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