VIDEO: Lotus shows 3-Eleven eating Porsches for breakfast
Cheeky dashcam footage shows firm's fastest-ever sportscar passing Porkers at the Nurburgring as engineers rack up the development milesLotus has released two new videos of its new 3-Eleven road-legal racer being development at the Nurburgring.
The Lotus 3-Eleven is the replacement for the 2-Eleven that comes powered with a mid-mounted supercharged Toyota 3.5-litre V6 that comes with either 345kW for the extreme track version or 308kW for the version developed for the road.
Two transmissions will be offered - a regular six-speed manual or a near race-spec X-Trac six-speed sequential 'box that most track versions are expected to come with.
Weighing in at less than 890kg, the more powerful windscreen-less open-cockpit 3-Eleven can hit 97km/h (60mph) in 2.9 seconds and record a top speed of 290km/h.
The short videos released late last night show just how effective the 3-Eleven will be on track although, unfortunately, still do not show a whole complete timed lap of the Nurburgring.
Last year the Norfolk-based car-maker came in for heavy criticism after claiming the 3-Eleven had set a time Nurburgring lap of 7:06.
In reality, the time claimed wasn't from one complete lap of the old German toll road but one made up of an amalgamation of different sector times recorded on multiple laps - much to the anger of some enthusiasts who accused Lotus of cheating.
One of the unique challenges (headaches) of car-maker's recording time at the Green Hell is the difficulty of stringing together one complete representative lap of a car's true performance. Traffic, weather and human error over one entire lap have seen many try and fail to set a fast time over the years, hence the accusations Lotus had cheated.
In the past Lotus has publicaly stated that it hoped the 3-Eleven, when production-ready, would be capable of beating Porsche's 918 Spyder hypercar's laptime of 6:57.
In the UK the 3-Eleven costs around $150,000 for the road version and $200,000 for the faster track special.
Lotus plans to build 311 3-Elevens over two years, it's still not known if new importer Simply Sports Cars will green light the road-legal racer for down Under.
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