The Car That Beat HKS’s Carbon Time Attack Evo: A Lotus

I first saw this car a couple of years back in a full feature spread placed in UK’s Evo Magazine (easily the worlds best car magazine written in English). When I first saw it I was extremely impressed but it appeared that it was just a concept car designed to show off Lotus race prep capabilities. It was meant to be their vision of a GT racer using the Exige chassis, but they didnt seem to have any further plans for it. They ultimately called it the Exige 300R. At the time it looked to me that the car would do the show circuit as a fancy Lotus concept car and that’d be the end of it. A damn shame that would have been if my thoughts were correct. Here are some of the specs:

1580 LBS
Full dry carbon widebody
400hp DTM spec 3.0L V6
Hewland sequential transmission
Motec M8, Ohlins custom suspension, AP brakes, etc.

Now, a high revving 400hp 6cyl and a sequential transmission in a 1580 package–that just sounds like an insane death machine. How insane you ask? Continue reading…

So a little more about that title I used for this post: The HKS carbon Evo is the fastest time attack car known to man. I was nearly sure that no car has ever beat it, anywhere. It has run something like 54 seconds flat at Tsukuba, which is simply untouchable. Then I read this: "The Exige 300RR also garnered quite a stellar competition history. It’s the only car to win the 12hr Merdeka Millennium Endurance race back to back (2005 & 2006). In 2007, it won the HKS Time Attack challenge in Malaysia, against the all conquering HKS CT230. The car even competed in individual FIA GT and Super GT events in 2005, making it the only race vehicle to have competed in both championships. The car was retired from racing in 2008 by it owners, Proton Cars."

So it turns out that the car ended up getting quite a bit of use after all! And best of all, this one-off Lotus racer is actually for sale. All for a bargain price of only 290,000 Euro (or about $448,000). See for yourself on race-cars.com.