This is going well. The derestricted A7 autobahn we’re barrelling down is almost empty of traffic, so the Esprit’s speedo needle has been hovering around the 130mph mark for a while now. Bright sunlight is pouring through the glass roof above me but it’s cold out there, the outside temperature hovering just below freezing for most of the trip down, despite all the brightness. In the distance, I can just see the snowy caps of the Austrian Alps on the horizon, their jagged profile edged by a cloudless blue sky. It’s so perfect, in fact, that the scene ahead could be a movie set. Strange, that.
The engine in the Turbo Esprit HC I’m travelling in might be merely a 2.2-litre turbocharged four-cylinder but it’s gorging itself on this chilled air and is loving it, delivering more than enough punch once past 100mph to keep the occasional Mercedes or Audi mobile boardroom honest when scoring occupation rights to the outside lane. The surprising increase in wind noise generated around the B-pillars at greater speeds is acting as my only limiter, rather than any lack of power. Well, that and the fact that I don’t want to stress the engine too much before we reach our destination. That’s still some 240 miles south from here, after all.
And now, I guess, I should explain to you why I’m driving my 1987 ‘Giugiaro’ Lotus Turbo Esprit HC so quickly down a German autobahn on this crisp winter’s day. Bond is the reason. You know, James Bond. We’re not shaken but we’re certainly stirred.
Wind back the clock to Sunday 4 January 1981, and two Lotus Turbo Esprits – near-identical to mine – set off from the Lotus factory in Hethel with the strict instruction to be on set for the new Bond movie For Your Eyes Only the following day. Their destination was the chic ski resort of Cortina in the Italian Dolomites, where a crew had gathered to start filming. The two designated drivers for this mission were Dave Minter, head of dynamic engineering at Lotus, and Don McLauchlan, whose role was to organise all the marketing and PR activities and who had been directly responsible for getting the Lotus Esprit into the Bond movies in the first place.
Their only problem was that they didn’t have as much luck with the weather. The roads down to Cortina from Austria on that chilly January weekend were blocked by heavy snow, forcing a lengthy detour to get around the Alps. So, instead of travelling through Germany, followed by a dash across Austria and down towards Cortina, they ended up having to put the two Esprits on the transporter train in Calais and then head overnight to Nice. Once they arrived in Nice, they set off for Cortina first thing on the Monday morning, driving towards Genoa first, before turning north for Milan and then up to Cortina from the south. I was keen to drive the more direct route as I’d been told that the journey via Austria was spectacular.
As we near the Austrian border, the high-speed shenanigans come to an end and we’re funnelled into a tunnel and then out onto a regular two-lane highway, heading first towards Innsbruck, then up into the mountains. The speed may have dropped dramatically but the scenery outside has ratcheted up several notches. If you look on a map, you’ll notice Austria is shaped a bit like a sausage carefully laid horizontally between Germany and Italy and all we need to do is the short dash straight across the middle in order to reach the Dolomites.
Unfortunately, it seems as though most of the trucks heading for Italy are using the same road as me, so while the scenery is fantastic, the grind through the mountains is tedious in the extreme. But as we reach the Italian border, two things happen. First, the draconian speed limits disappear and overtaking gets a little easier. Second, the trucks turn out to have been heading for anywhere but Cortina and we’re suddenly left to our own devices and have the wonderful SS51 to ourselves for the run down to the town. Bliss.
This is just the sort of road I’d drive several hundred miles to search out
I often think my Turbo Esprit HC is the most surprisingly talented car in my garage. For starters, it’s a featherweight at only 1146kg on my scales ready to go, despite being equipped with such luxuries as air-con and a removable glass roof, never mind its leather-lined cabin. Then, if you love driving, you soon discover that all the important bits have been tuned to deliver maximum feedback and enjoyment. OK, the footwell is a bit tight (when asked why, Chapman once joked that Lotus customers don’t wear hobnail boots when driving) but the brake pedal is reassuringly solid and is perfectly positioned for heel-and-toeing.
The steering is unassisted and annoyingly heavy when parking but, on this twisting Alpine road, it lightens beautifully and becomes a precision tool for placing the car exactly where you want it to go. It seems to sense the perfect line through corners, allowing you to feel the slight camber change as you kiss an apex then light up the turbo again to power down the next straight. I get to repeat this addictive game of stringing corners together again and again as we edge closer to Cortina. When the road bursts out of another pocket of trees clinging to the mountainside, there are a few more signs of civilisation around us and we spot the Cortina d’Ampezzo sign in the distance, marking the end of this wonderful section of road and the start of Cortina itself.
I’m buzzing. Happily, this is just the sort of road I’d drive several hundred miles to search out. It could have been made for the Esprit, which has been dancing along for miles now, without even once threatening to get out of shape thanks to its stupefyingly high levels of grip and stubborn resistance to both under- and oversteer.
The final approach to Cortina was very different for messrs Minter and McLauchlan. Here’s an extract from the internal report Don McLauchlan wrote after returning to Hethel: ‘We only stopped twice for fuel/coffee and after dark turned off the motorway into the Dolomites. It suddenly became very cold, and snowed. The roads were very icy and we had already been driving hard for several hours so we decided to really ease off. Just as well, as the road suddenly petered out and we had 100 miles of zig-zag hairpin bends and precipices ahead of us – in the dark – on ice. We arrived in Cortina at 8:00pm, were met by the film crew, thankful to see us on time and in one bit.’
It’s late afternoon when we arrive in Cortina and – after a fill-up at what I later discover is the most expensive fuel stop in town (€1.82/litre) – it’s time to find our hotel, the grandly named Miramonti Majestic Grand Hotel. Which happens to be where both Mr J Bond and the crew stayed during the filming of For Your Eyes Only back in 1981.
Cortina isn’t like any other ski resort I’ve ever been to; for starters, there are no signs of anyone actually skiing, nor are there any visible lifts up to the slopes. It seems just like any other very pretty Italian town, nestling in a valley and ringed by spectacular rocky mountains, which are turning a picture-perfect orange hue as the sun starts to dip below the horizon.
Our hotel turns out to be on the outskirts and is accessed by a short, winding road up to an imposing façade. I had no idea that it was going to be quite so huge: it must have several hundred bedrooms and that’s before we spot another wing almost as large again around the back. Yet when we park up outside the entrance, there’s no-one else to be seen. A porter pops out and cheerfully takes our bags and leads us inside to reception.
There must be very few guests staying here tonight as everyone seems remarkably helpful and has plenty of time on their hands, which is not what I expected at the height of the ski season. The room itself turns out to be down several kilometres of corridor and is decorated in, well, let’s call it a period style. It’s fair to say that it hasn’t been touched in decades but even that can’t prepare us for when we venture down to the bar that evening. The bar is almost empty, except for a couple at the far side, but over in another corner is a silver-haired gentleman who is the spitting image of Flavio Briatore, tapping away on a grand piano and crooning out melodies from about the same era as when this hotel was built. I’m annoyed with myself for not wanting a (shaken, not stirred) Martini and order a beer instead.
The morning dawns bright and, after a long walk to breakfast and back, plus a quick visit to room 308 – that’s where Bond stayed when in Cortina – it’s time to check out the various locations in the area and see if we can match my Lotus Esprit to what appeared in the movie.
First, of course, I need to address something. My Esprit is white, and the one in the movie was finished in Copper Fire, which was requested by the film directors after they became concerned that the white Turbo Esprit used (and blown up) in an earlier scene in the movie (filmed in Corfu) wouldn’t show up too well against the snow in Cortina. Strangely, there’s no mention of this colour change in the movie: Bond spots the damaged Esprit in Q’s workshop and comments that he’s glad it’s getting rebuilt again but says nothing about the paint. Today, continuity types would be going nuts over such an obvious faux-pas. You won’t be surprised to hear that I think they ought to have carried on with the white car throughout the movie. To see what it should have looked like, we set off down the twisting hotel driveway and head for the ski-jump arena, just a couple of kilometres away.
I love how, in Italy, you can just drive up a bumpy access road, through some woodland and then park underneath this spectacular structure that’s frozen in time. If you’ve watched the movie (I did, of course, as part of my research and it was fantastic: funny and then gripping in a way that today’s over-produced Bond films aren’t) then you’ll know there’s a famous scene in which Bond ends up having to go down this ski-jump. Now I’m here, all I can say is rather him than me. There’s a faded elegance to the arena and, as I stand at the take-off point of the ramp and look into the landing area below, I find it remarkable to think that if one of today’s top ski-jumpers took off from here, they’d fly so far that they’d miss the arena completely and crash-land on the hillside beyond it, such has been the progress in this scary sport.
Next, I’m keen to visit Cortina’s Olympic Ice Rink, where there was a night scene in the film starring the copper Esprit. Basically, Bond arrives, parks, and leaves a contact he was with at the time sitting in the passenger seat while he goes to meet someone inside. But when Bond returns, his contact is dead, slumped in the passenger seat. We won’t be re-enacting that bit. Here are Don McLauchlan’s notes on this filming sequence. ‘It was a night sequence establishing Roger Moore in the car as he arrives at the ice rink. The snow was brought in by truck and carefully laid on the approach road for the car. We filmed until 8:00pm and it was cold – very, very cold – minus 25 degrees. Roger Moore and yours truly were the only poor sods not able to wear Sno-Boots as you can’t drive a Turbo in “elephant feet” boots. By 6:00pm your feet were painful, by 7:00pm numb – by 8:00pm they seemed just cold – until you went back to the warm hotel – then they were agony for an hour. Good fun, this filming business.’
When we visit the ice rink it’s in bright sunlight, so we have no such worries. In fact the weather is so nice that we decide to head out of town and up towards the craggy cliffs that surround Cortina on all sides of the valley. The road is busier than I’d expected but mostly with skiers heading to where the ski lifts operate. Oddly, these are not centred in one location but scattered over several kilometres as you climb up what turns out to be the beginnings of a mountain pass. It’s captivatingly scenic here; no wonder it was used as a location for a Bond movie and it’s no surprise to see the Lotus getting Instagram’d wherever we go. But, then, how often do you see an Esprit with two sets of skis strapped to its engine cover, powering its way up a mountainside?
As we reach the summit, I spot a gentle piste to our left and, with few people around, I dare myself to drive onto the crisp, crinkly, piste-bashed surface. Of course, it could end in tears. Only one way to find out…
Phew, my theory that the Esprit is so-super-light-it-should-be-fine proves correct, though I need to be on a downward slope before stopping, with no lock applied. Once it’s stationary, I get out and marvel at both the amazing landscape surrounding us and the crisply defined lines of the Esprit. What a fantastic piece of design it is: no wonder it’s one of the most fondly remembered Bond cars of all time. I think its appeal lies in it being the plucky British underdog that was more than capable of backing up its good looks by over-delivering dynamically. Go back to when this ’87 Turbo Esprit HC was new and its list price was £24,980, little more than 60% of the £39,975 Ferrari charged for its 328 GTS, yet the Lotus looked just as good in the glamour stakes and could match the Ferrari’s time in a sprint from rest to 60mph. Today the price gap is even wider but I know from experience that the driving pleasure is much closer. Having owned both, I can also say that the big difference is in running costs, where the Lotus is the runaway winner.
And I’d choose the Lotus over the Ferrari because its on-road dynamics are that much better; the S3 Turbo Esprit actually feels rather like today’s Alpine A110. The only criticism I have is that the four-pot engine sounds pretty ordinary at lower revs but, once you have it spinning above 3500rpm, it morphs into a wonderfully smooth unit that’ll happily spin up to 7000rpm (there’s no redline), and it entertains with an old-school soundtrack of turbo whistle and wastegate chatter between shifts that makes me smile every time I hear it.
I’ve loved every minute of this 1000-mile trip to Cortina d’Ampezzo, seeing for myself where the snowy scenes in For Your Eyes Only were filmed. Cortina is a magical place and the Esprit has proven itself to be a fine companion, much more of a GT than any of today’s Lotus cars. Don McLauchlan was clearly a marketing genius to get the Esprit starring in two Bond movies. Incredibly, no formal contract between Lotus and the production team was ever signed, which is astounding given the millions paid since by manufacturers to get their cars featured – with good reason, as McLauchlan describes a meeting before the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me.
‘We had lunch, and Cubby [Broccoli] said what he wanted to do with the new Bond film and asked if we wanted our Lotus to be in it. We never signed a contract; never had letters of agreement. A gentlemen’s handshake, and we were in the film. We supplied seven Esprit bodyshells and lots of bits and pieces. They took one of the shells to a company that specialised in submersibles and they turned it into the submarine.
‘The total cost for all the bodyshells, materials and the two roadgoing cars – which remained our property – came to £17,500 from my PR budget. That would have paid for one page of advertising in a glossy supplement. If you consider how much publicity James Bond’s Lotus generated around the world, and still generates, it was worth millions.’
Congratulations, Don. Job well done, I’d say.
1987 Lotus Turbo Esprit HC specifications
Engine 2172cc DOHC four-cylinder, 16-valve, twin Dell’Orto DHLA 45M carburettors, Garrett AiResearch T3 turbocharger Power 215bhp @ 6000rpm Torque 221lb ft @ 4250rpm Transmission Five-speed manual transaxle, rear-wheel drive Steering Rack and pinion Suspension Front: double wishbones, coil springs, telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar. Rear: trailing arms, transverse links, coil springs, telescopic dampers Brakes Vented discs Weight 1146kg Top speed 152mph 0-60mph 5.6sec
This article originally appeared in the July 2020 issue of Octane
