The interior is a light grey. Everything is light grey - seats, console, dash, instrument cluster, headliner and carpeting. I have one other car that also has a grey interior. It gets driven year round, and Minnesota winters are not kind to light interiors. From the looks of it, neither is California. At first I thought it would clean up, but after working it over with a couple of different cleaners, it got better, but not good enough. So, the entire interior will get the Leatherique treatment this winter. I will also replace the carpeting, as that has taken a beating as well.
The materials in the interior are in pretty good shape overall. A lot of older Esprits start to have separation problems with the glue holding the leather to the dash. The glue gives up and the leather starts to pull away from the edges. This is almost impossible to fix without taking the windshield out. Fortunately, this car has not suffered that problem.
Another problem area is the corner of the seat bolsters on the outboard side of the seats. The seam splits and the foam starts to get damaged from getting in and out of the car. Before Lotus started installing seats that reclined, owners would often swap the passenger seat for the drivers seat when the bolsters got bad, so sometimes you see damage to the passenger seat bolster next to the console. The reclining Esprit seats still have the bolster wear problem, but the big 'ol knob on the outer side prevents the seats from being swapped. This is the passenger seat. As you can see (sorta), the bolsters are in good shape. Whoever the previous owner was, they must have had many passengers.
The drivers seat is another issue. Here you can see the seam has started to split, and there is some scraping on the seatback. I'm not sure what the scraping is from. The only way to fix it is to redye the seat. Bremseth has an interior guy working next door who does fabulous work on custom auto interiors (I really need to remember his name...). I'll have him take a look at the seam to see if it can be repaired. It's kind of a moot point since my wife can't drive Esprits with non-reclining seats. The fixed rake on the early seats is too far back and she can't see over the instrument cluster. I replaced the original seats in my '83 with V8 Esprit seats (reclines and has a lumbar support - Bonus!). They drop right in and don't look too much out of place. At the time, it was cheaper to go that route than to recover my original seats. I'm not sure if that is true anymore, but if somebody knows of a set of V8 seats out there looking for a home, let me know. In the meantime, I'll fix these up.
Leatherique will match the original color if I send them a sample. There are plenty of places where I can snip a bit of unexposed leather. I'm thinking I may make a color change, however my taste is pretty questionable when it comes to this stuff. I've considered moving the tan interior from the '83 over to this car and putting grey in the black car. We'll see.
A huge benefit of the Leatherique process is that to really make it work, you have to strip as much of the old dye off of the leather that you can. It takes some care to not wreck any stitching and you have to stop before you start making suede. Once the dye is removed, the Leatherique rejuvenating oil really has an opportunity to work. I redid the '83 interior more as a learning experience because I thought the leather was so far dried out that it was not salvageable. I was impressed with the results - the leather is much more supple even after 7 years. There will be lots to blog about when I start in on these panels.
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