Lotus 05 Elise Luxury Sport 6-speed Manual Premium Performance Blaupunkt on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Lotus Elise, Exige recalled over oil line fire risk

Lotus is recalling 451 examples of the Elise and Exige from the 2007 and 2008 model years. The cars in question, built from December 1, 2006 to October 31, 2007 could be affected by an oil cooler line that detaches from its fitting. If the line comes loose it could release oil onto the engine and possibly start a fire, or onto a tire and potentially cause a crash.
A bulletin from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicates the recall is expected to begin on March 4. Notified owners can take their cars to their dealers for repairs to the lateral oil cooler hose and hose fittings. You'll find the full release from the NHTSA below with more information.

Lotus names Jean-Marc Gales as new CEO

It's been about two years since DRB-Hicom took over Proton, and through it Lotus. One of its first courses of action was to fire the existing CEO, Dany Bahar, and proceed to scrap most if not all of his (arguably over-) ambitious plans. In his place they put one of their own - Aslam Farikullah - as Chief Operation Officer, but now the Malaysian-owned British automaker has attracted an industry heavyweight to lead it into the future.
That heavyweight is Jean-Marc Gales. The British- and German-educated Luxembourgian has spent the past couple of years running the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA), but may be better known for his previous posting as CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroën between 2009 and 2012, during which time he introduced the Citroën DS line, amongst others, and increased the French automaker's sales. Before PSA he worked for Daimler, General Motors and Volkswagen.
As the new Chief Executive Officer of Group Lotus, Gales will face the difficult task of growing a business based on three models - the Elise, Exige and Evora - that date back to 1996, 2000 and 2009, respectively. Whether he'll push for new models like his predecessor did remains to be seen, but he'd be wise to learn from Bahar's mistakes and avoid overextending what has always been a relatively small automaker.

Race Recap: 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix follows the template of this year and last [spoilers]

The sand, the wind, the penalties, the contact and the one crash - all of them collided to make the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix a surprise affair from day to day and lap to lap. Oh, and did we mention the tires? Pirelli made a last-minute swap after the amusement park ride that the Chinese Grand Prix turned into with the soft compound tire, and brought medium and hard compounds to the desert. That didn't stop things from falling apart for some teams - literally - and that didn't stop the one team that seems to love the hard compound Pirelli tire.