Lotus summons grand prix ghosts for new Evora Sport 410 GP Edition

Lotus has been absent from the Formula One grid since 2015, and recent performances by teams bearing the Lotus name make it easy to forget the British automaker was once one of the sport’s greats. Now, Lotus is trying to remind people of that.

The Lotus Evora Sport 410 GP Edition is a special-edition model decked out in F1 nostalgia. Wearing Lotus’ classic black and gold F1 livery, the GP Edition will help create extra buzz around the North American launch of the Evora Sport 410, the latest version of what is currently the only street-legal Lotus sold in the U.S.

The now-iconic livery was based on the colors of John Player cigarettes. Lotus was one of the first race teams to decorate its cars in sponsor imagery, and sadly modern efforts aren’t quite as classy. Lotus used the black and gold livery from 1972 to 1986, and it adorned race cars driven by greats like Mario Andretti, Emerson Fittipaldi, and Ayrton Senna.

The Evora Sport 410 isn’t an F1 car, but is pretty quick. Like other Evora models, it uses a Toyota-sourced 3.5-liter V6. But this isn’t the engine from your grandma’s Camry: It’s supercharged, and produces 400 horsepower and 301 pound-feet of torque. That power flows to the rear wheels through a six-speed manual transmission (a six-speed automatic is optional), and only has to push 3,020 pounds.

That combination of power and light weight gets the Evora Sport 410 from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.9 seconds, according to Lotus. The automaker previously quoted a top speed of 186 mph for manual-transmission cars, and 174 mph for automatics. While it is refreshingly free of electronic gimmicks, the Sport 410 does feature four programmable modes for its stability control: Drive, Sport, Race, and Off. Sport and Race also sharpen throttle response and open baffles in the exhaust for more noise.

Overall production of the Lotus Evora Sport 410 is capped at 150 units per year, but Lotus will only make five copies of the GP Edition. Pricing starts at $110,000 for the GP Edition, and $104,200 for the standard Evora Sport 410.