If you jack an Elise in the wrong place it’ll snap like last years Ryvita. If you attempt to take the wheels off, you will scratch an alloy. If you manage to get it in the air you’ll not know where to place the axle stands and, when you get it wrong, they’ll punch through the floor without so much as a squeak. The bodywork, that’ll all have to come off. The clips will break. There will be hidden fasteners designed to compete with those Chinese puzzles you get in Christmas crackers. Tiny, irreplaceable parts will ping off, somehow flying through a black hole, perhaps to appear on a garage floor in an alternate universe. Your hands will swell to be the size of a Yeti’s when attempting to get to the part that needs fixing and, when you’ve smashed the car into more manageable chunks with a blunt axe, because you have neither the tools or the patience needed to take an Elise apart properly, you’ll not recognise the part. It will almost certainly have started life in the parts bin of something humdrum. It will look sort-of familiar, but not so familiar that you’ll risk ordering one online from the only vendor in the universe that claims to have one in stock. You cannot risk it. That long, confusing Lotus part number means it’ll be a Citroën part with a 500% mark-up but tough luck, Chapman challenges you from his grave to work it out. The part number contains a hidden cipher from the designer, spelling out “you hopeless twat”.
*take a breath, Rich, it’ll be OK…*
What is that part? You resort to the internet. The internet says you can 3D print one, but you are not Bill Gates, and you can’t use a keyboard with fingers still blooded from extracting the part in the first place. It becomes a man thing. A thing of pride. I am a man, I can repair a car. I can take it apart, do spannering, and become immediately irresistible to the opposite sex. Don’t you dare defy me, car! And then the aches start. You get your head wedged somewhere. The one socket you have that fits falls into a gap between engine/gearbox/bulkhead that is less accessible than an Artic crevass. Look underneath, being careful not to wobble the car off the jack, as you still don’t dare stand it on axle stands. No, it’s not there, but there are dozens of shattered bits of plastic, tiny metal… things… and puddles of mystery fluid from silently pissing hoses you’ve somehow disturbed. You take a moment to reassess which becomes a nap, prone on the garage floor. “Are you coming in for your dinner, love?” No. I am a man. I am waiting for my wounds to scab over. Inside for a cup of tea, dinner having gone cold, her attention lost to FaceBook. So to YouTube to find a fix. Hours of distraction from all those bloody smart-arse YouToobers with their spotless garages, neat toolkits and gormless faces and perfect teeth and LIES about working on an Elise. In desperation you order the part, sweep most of the bodywork and presumably superfluous parts into a neat heap, in a pathetic attempt to feel any sense of achievement. The part arrives. It is the wrong size, shape, material and colour. It is about as compatible with your car as Prince Andrew is with babysitting. And you can’t send it back. They would know you’re an idiot. So it goes in the boot, just in case you ever need a high pressure diesel pump for a Chinese van engine in your Lotus Elise. And you can’t call the garage now. You can’t drive the bloody thing. You can’t even drag it’s plastic and aluminium carcass onto a flatbed for delivery to the garage. And, if you could, the shame of your amateur tinkering will cause the mechanic to bust a lung laughing, before adding a substantial “idiot tax” to the bill.
This, friends, is my thought process when considering any work on my Lotus Elise. It is why I don’t ever work on it myself. I take it to PJS Sportscars in Burton-on-Trent who probably already know I’m an idiot and are happy that I do not have to prove it to them by ruining my car.
