Lotus Europa Community

What front tyres are fitted, and at what psi are they inflated?

When you say you may have over inflated the tires, how much are we talking? As stated the TCS is very light in the front and over inflated front tires will cause the tire treads to become more rounded giving a smaller contact patch. Also the width of the tire and the cars relatively narrow track may cause the car to “seek” the worn area of the road. So you go from the left tires running in the left track and the right side tires being on a higher portion. Then the right side tires will drop down into the right side tire track.
FYI you should maintain an 8 to 10 lb.’s difference front to back.

Alas, they do not have an S1 service bulletin collection.

Losing Lotus Europa Central as an active site is a tremendous loss for all of us.  It is good that we can still access the old info but I sure wish they still had an up to date registry of going and a way to upload new info.  I first learned about the car that I now possess about fifteen years ago on the registry.  I contacted the previous owner and bugged him for a decade or more until I was finally able to become the new guardian of 46/0202.  Many, many thanks to Jerry for creating and maintaining that great website for so many years.

That's why, when Jerry, Steve Veris, Whit Davis (RIP), and I built the documentation portion of the site, we mirrored it at my site so as to ensure that the corporate knowledge, as it were, was in multiple locations.  For a while, we were sending out CDRoms of the documentation site so folks could load it locally (my site's mirror of Jerry's is actually a network-mounted CDRom so I can get to it from the net or over my home lan).  Believe or not, some lowlife scammers were scraping the site, burning their own CDRoms, putting a label on it and auctioning it off on EvilBay.  I do know that Hethel downloaded the manuals because our PDFs were cleaner than what they had on file to run off a new batch of manuals back in the day.  Guess by 2007 or 8, all they had were multiple generations of copies down to print from; the manuals in the doc page were scanned from a never-unwrapped workshpp and parts manual.

The big issue is that the database is (was?) something that Jerry originally built in Access, and maintaining it was a highly manual process, and the backend is decades out of date.  Same was true of the Knowledge Base, but that has been updated the last I checked (https://www.prevanders.net/kb2.html)...you have to remember that by now (the Lotus Europa mailing list that started out on One List as a fork of the USENET rec.autos.lotus group, migrated to yahoogroups for years, and is now on groups.io, was founded in October 1998) has accumulated over 181,000 messages to index, sort, etc.  There is a LOT going on in the background that we take for granted. 

The Elan folks have a nice database that would serve our purpose, but it would require more than migration of a few webapps and so forth.  I had talked with Dan a year or so ago about it but have to admit that my coding skills in the latest and greatest language du jour is non-existent (maybe we should find a high school kid to do it?).

Biggest issue is time.  Those who maintain web sites can vouch for the fact that what you see takes 90% of the time you allot to it, the other 10% takes 90% of the time you have left. 

I'm not a fan of the spring used to preload the tension on the rack. It's not a front heavy Spitfire and IMO too much. Things that will make a car not track straight, this is on the front. Uneven camber. Un even caster. Both not adjustable on a stock car. Excessive toe in or toe out will cause a darty feel but not usually a wandering from center. I have seen a new tire cause a pull, it was swapped left to right to verify. A low tire would cause drag, like really low.

As well as the bushes below the lever, head back to the tree and check play there and maybe fully rose joint, then to the back of the gear box where there are several potential places for play. The cross shaft is a weakness with attaching bolts loose as holes oval unless plain shank bolts are not used. The lotus cross shaft steel is not the best and can break where the holes are. With everything tight the gear change can approach excellent.