The Lotus Elise

If I'm honest, I had no real intention of buying the car we were driving over to see. The advert looked good - a nice low mileage 02 Lotus Elise S2 in Ice Blue about 15 miles away in Fife. It was standard apart from a Lotus Sport exhaust and the price was keen, but I already had a Mazda MX5 mk1 to fulfil the open top brief.

Really, it was just a diversion on a pretty boring weekend as I headed over with Ross, chatting about the Elise he used to have a few years ago and all the usual things to watch out for.

What I wasn't expecting was just how, well, NICE the car was. It was immaculate, recently valeted and had been obviously well looked after. The mileage was indeed low, 24k, but it had been serviced once a year at the local official Lotus dealership. I've lost count of the times I've seen "Full Service History" in an advert, only to be greeted by 2 year gaps when I actually look at the book.

The seller was a honest guy, selling the car to fund a house move. He seemed genuinely gutted about selling it, which reassured me that the car was probably decent. He took me out for 5 minutes and then handed me the keys.

Now, when Ross had his Elise I had a couple of drives so I knew they were good. However I had forgotten just HOW good. That feedback you get after a couple of corners instantly put a smile on my face and it stayed there all the way back to the guys house. You feel absolutely connected to the car

I loved it.

We got back to the seller's house and I said I would go away and think about it, but I knew that I'd pretty much it had to have it.

Sure enough, a couple of emails back and forth later I had haggled the price down and I was the proud owner of a Lotus Elise!

Job done. Now I just needed to tell my other half...