Lotus and Williams to co-develop Omega hypercar

There was a time when Lotus and Williams battled it out for Grand Prix pole positions, race wins and championships.

Now, the two Formula One legends have teamed up to build Lotus’s halo hypercar to mark its rebirth under new owners, Geely.

Lotus has turned to Williams Advanced Engineering division to help it with the “advanced propulsion technologies” for its £2 million ($A3.67 million) limited-edition Omega comeback car.

While neither Williams Advanced Engineering nor Lotus has given out details of exactly what work the F1 outfit is doing for the Hethel-based sportscar maker, it’s surely powertrain-related and due in about two years.

The timeframe is believed to have been locked in so the hypercar can land just before a new range of Lotus sports cars to replace the aging Evora and the medieval Elise.

“Our new technology partnership with Williams Advanced Engineering is part of a strategy to expand our knowledge and capability in the rapidly changing automotive landscape,” Lotus Cars chief executive Phil Popham said.

“Applying advanced propulsion powertrains can provide numerous exciting solutions across multiple vehicle sectors.

"Our combined and complementary experiences make this a very compelling match of engineering talent, technical ability and pioneering British spirit.”

The Lotus “Omega” project will launch in two years, give or take a few months, at a huge price tag. It will be the point of the sword for moving Lotus upmarket to compete with Ferrari and Porsche.

It’s expected to be an all-wheel drive electric hypercar with two or more electric motors and at least 400km of electric range.

Given that Williams provided the batteries for every car over the first three years of the Formula E championship, it’s likely that Lotus will allow it to convert that technology or move to a next-generation version of it.

Williams also has expertise in energy regeneration and has some big-name operations on its CV.

It built Nissan’s Bladeglider concept cars, worked with Porsche’s Le Mans-winning LMP1 program and did all the aerodynamic work on the Ginetta sports car.

It has a collaboration with Nissan’s high-performance Nismo arm, developed its own flat-six engine and gearbox unit for Singer and built six Jaguar C-X75 concept cars for use in the James Bond film, Spectre.

Williams also had a division called Williams Hybrid Power, which developed the flywheel energy recuperation and storage system. The technology won the 2012 Le Mans 24 Hour race with Audi’s R18 LMP1 car and almost won the Nürburgring 24 Hour race in a Porsche 911 Hybrid until a conventional valve-spring broke.

The systems were also used for buses and trams to lower CO2 emissions, but this part of the Williams business was sold to GKN in 2014.

Lotus once had a huge reputation for its independent engineering arm, which did much of the work on the brilliant T162 Toyota Celica from 1985 and engineered cars like the legendary Lotus Cortina for Ford and the Lotus Carlton for Vauxhall.

But Geely ownership has fundamentally changed the chances of both Lotus’s success and its EV potential.

Geely already owns Volvo and its EV Polestar brand, the new Lynk & Co brand, electric taxi maker LEVC, Proton and even a flying car-maker in Terrafugia. Its founder, Li Shufu, is also the largest shareholder in Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, Daimler.

Still, it’s hard to know what the performance targets are for the Lotus hypercar, largely because its EV nature and the traditional Lotus core value of lightness are normally at odds with each other.

Volkswagen has gone extreme on the EV hypercar thing, with its ID R taking the Pikes Peak hillclimb record last year and now threatening the Nürburgring EV record, set by Nio’s EP9 1000kW car at 6:45.9.

The last golden period of the once-dominant Team Lotus Formula One operation (not to be confused with the more modern Lotus F1 outfit that morphed into the current Renault team) was in 1978, when it won both the constructors and drivers titles (with Mario Andretti).

It was the first Formula One team to 50 wins, beating even Ferrari, but fell into decline after the death of its founder, Colin Chapman, and its final Grand Prix was in Australia in 1994.

Coincidentally, 1978 saw the emergence of Williams, which fielded its first self-engineered cars and went on to nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ championships, though its current doldrums have been long.

Its last victory was, unbelievably, Pastor Maldonado’s only win, in the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix. Even that belies the length of its slump, because it was the first Williams win since 2004.