Lotus to return to Le Mans racing?

[carsten66]

Originally Posted by Mal

With two senior ex Ferrari F1 people now in place at Lotus to run the 'le mans and indycar project' there must be something pretty serious in the pipeline.http://joesaward.wordpress.com/

The offical Lotus press release said... "Group Lotus is pleased to announce the appointment of Claudio Berro to the new role of Director of Motorsport for Lotus..."

and... Dany Bahar, Group Lotus CEO: "I am delighted that Claudio is joining us as Director of Motorsport. He has a proven track record of not only setting up and managing the motorsport’s divisions within sportscar brands but also winning championships in GT racing and rallying. His skills will be very valuable as we look to return Lotus to high level motorsport around the world..."

That's sounds more indefinite than what Saward wrote on his blog...

[juicy sushi]

I think if there was a 2wd Group N spec class then an Exige could do rather well (in a Lancia Stratos kind of way) in rallying. But I think these press releases are mainly puff pieces. You can't do anything beyond customer racing without some serious cash, and I don't believe the Lotus Group really has that kind of money lying around to be spent. Perhaps, as others have said, a future Esprit could be done for GT2, but until then, GT3 and N24 type stuff would be the very limit of what's possible, and I think GT4 is probably most realistic in terms of what the brand can afford to do...

[carsten66]

Originally Posted by TWRv12

Isn't there one of those Lotus puff pieces that mentions going rallying too. Amazing how they are suddenly going to do almost everything.

The big bang approach, always goes bang bigtime.

Lotus is owned by the Proton Group (a Malaysian carmaker) and the majority shareholder of Proton is the state of Malaysia... that's where the money comes from... The new CEO of the Lotus Group, Dany Bahar, indeed has revealed greater ambitions in motor racing than only Formula One...

However, it was clarified that the Lotus F1 team will be separate from Group Lotus, and reports said Proton is looking over the team's license agreement for use of the name.

By the way... Dany Bahar was once Dietrich Mateschitz's right hand man at Red Bull before he switched to Ferrari...