Making It All Fit

Its one thing to find all kinds of good used original parts at reasonable prices all over the world and have them shipped to your home. Its another to get to the point where you can actually start fitting those parts to the car. Today I fit the SE radiator duct and the Sport 350 oil cooler ducts, coolers and duct platforms to the nose of the car.

I expected that there would be some fibreglass work and some new holes to add to get everything to fit. I was pleasantly surprised at how well things lined up. The mounting holes on the right hand side lined up perfectly, although some of the holes cut to fit around some of the other mounting hardware in the body will need to be moved. On the left hand side, two holes have to be moved in addition to the relief holes. I drilled some quick holes in the duct to get it bolted up to the car. I will need to patch the holes in the wrong place and redrill, but it is good enough for now. There are also two holes in the front of the duct that were not used on the '87 duct, so those have been drilled into the car. They are located in the space below the headlamp pods, so I will need to add nutserts when I finally mount it up.



The oil cooler duct platforms also mounted up a lot easier than I expected. Most of the holes are already in the radiator duct, so some old M6 bolts are holding it together for now. The platforms are also supported by the lower edge of front spoiler, so they will help define the dimensions of the new spoiler.

Since a lot of space in the sides of the spoiler was empty in the early cars, Lotus put stuff there - like horns and hoses. These had to be moved to make room for the oil coolers and ductwork.



Once space is made, you can see that everything will fit in the space available. Some holes will need to be moved and others will need to be filled. The oil coolers are hanging from one of the bolts for the original front spoiler. They aren't quite in the right spot, but that's the nice thing about fibreglass. It's easy to move stuff like holes. You can also see that some of the bits extend outside of the body lines...



Lotus made a styling change in 1988. In my opinion Peter Stevens did a great job, as the car was modernized yet still instantly recognizeable as an Esprit. The hard origami edges of the Esprit were softened and the front and rear bumpers were integrated into the overall design. One of the changes he made was to bring the front spoiler forward to almost match up with the leading edge of the bumper. The cooling boys took advantage of this and moved the leading edge of the radiator duct forward as well, as you can see here.



In addition, the width of the front bumper was carried all the way back to the wheel opening and down into the sides of the spoiler. When the chargecooler was added, this extra space in the sides of the spoiler was filled with oil coolers and ductwork. So part of the fibreglass work I will need to do is make a whole new front spoiler and bumper cover to hide all the new stuff. And make it look nice.