Gold wheels and balancing weights for the type 49 limited edition - these red, gold and white cars (our hallway has the same livery!) have gold painted wheels.  Lotus decided that normal balancing weights looked awful so they had some balancing weights made that were gold finished. Unfortunately they don' have a stock of these and neither does your local dealer or tyre centre.  Better buy a can of gold spray paint I think!

After manufacture the cars go through a bodywork inspection room where all paint blemishes are polished away or rectified.  Blemishes are marked with a felt tip pen and then attended to by a gang of bodywork specialists.

340R wheels - 10 times the torque required to tighten the single nut wheels and the crew didn't think that was a good idea. OK if a Lotus garage always serviced the car, but what about getting the tyres changed at a tyre centre?  Would they know or even have the right spanners?  Would you like the wheels to fall off?  I don't think so, hence the normal 4 bolt Elise hubs.

Many of the 340Rs were delivered with the wrong wheels, owners have now got the option of free replacements for the proper Technomagnesio wheels.

Official Publicity shots - One leaflet has a doctored photo of the front wheel, but they forgot to doctor the rear wheel, so it still has a single nut wheel at the back.  The other photos show four bolt wheels on the front and five bolt ones at the rear.  These are photos of the launch car with photos of the real wheels stuck on the top of them

Jon at Lotus had to run in one of the ride and drive 340Rs, putting 1,000 miles on the clock in a few days.  His first run home it was raining quite hard, but he only got the top of his hair wet, and then only slightly.

Just about all of the 340Rs have got homes to go to, even the show models and the Lotus test cars.

Lotus have at least two racing versions of the 340R at Hethel, single seat, less weight, with no mudguards and a lopsided racing roll bar.

They also have two Motor Sport Elises, not in race trim as the seat is not central. The green one is the one seen in most publicity shots, and a white one which we saw going around the track.  Embarrassingly, the motor sport version had to give way to the 340Rs on the ride and drive days, as the 340Rs were lapping quicker!  The Sport ones have higher top speed, but the 340Rs go round corners quicker and the track at Hethel is pretty twisty.

The suspension on the 340R doesn't feel much different to a standard Elise, but it is!

The Elise chassis is the stiffest in the world.

The 340R chassis are finished to a higher specification, particularly the glue lines which are much tidier as more of the chassis is exposed.  The visual clue as to which is which is that the 340R chassis doesn't have the vertical door connection pillars at the front.  One of the first things to be attached to the 340R chassis is the rear wing assembly.

The glue is now red (early Elises used green glue).

On the ride and drive day one of the 340Rs developed a nasty misfire at about 5,500 rpm. The test drivers remedy was to slam it into third at speed, instantly red-lining it to see if that would sort the problem out (it didn't, but a bit of tinkering soon did).

The seats in the 340R are carbon fibre-effect leather and blue alcantara.  The steering wheel is a normal Elise wheel, but with blue alcantara covering on the hub.

Some of the early 340Rs (I've seen two with car numbers in the 50's) had bare carbon fibre mudguards on the wheels.  This changed to black painted ones on later cars (certainly by car number 66).

Only 90 owners took Lotus up on the ride and drive days which were held on 23/24/25th February 2000.

A job lot of 60 cars is going to Japan, purchased by the official Lotus stockist in Tokyo.

The miniscule rear window (honest, there is one) appears to be there for some obscure type-approval reason, something to do with a measurement between the rear of the car and the back window!

And my favourite (courtesy of Autocar magazine)...

In the UK the DVLA (the car licensing authority) officially class the 340R as an MPV (have a look at your regstration document if you're a lucky owner!