The whole philosophy of Lotus cars is performance through lightness, not excessive power. Not everybody understands that though. Frank Profera is one of those guys. He got hold of a Lotus Exige six years ago, and he’s been fiddling with it ever since. The weight of the car remains as low as it was, but the power has gone up, a lot. This little mosquito now makes 680 wheel horsepower.
In this new episode of TUNED Matt Farah gets behind the wheel of this car to see how it feels like driving a 680hp house fly. Mind you, with Matt sitting in it, the car loses all its weight advantage.
The power comes from a twin-charged 1.8L engine, and that begs the question how big those turbos are? They give the cat a better power-to-weight ratio than Mario Andretti’s Formula 1 Lotus. Frank says this is an ongoing project that may never be finished, because of Frank’s never-ending obsession with speed.