The Type 111 Lotus Elise was well established with full order books, however Lotus felt the need to press ahead with the development of a radically uprated variant to satisfy those customers that wanted either the ultimate track day machine or a fully fledged competition car.

Known as the ‘Sprint’, it was quickly deemed too extreme to make it commercially viable, but the idea of a high-performance Elise had not gone away and in November 1997, Lotus unveiled a more practical proposition - the Sport 190.

Intended primarily for track use, the Sport 190 wasn’t strictly road-legal as it had never been through 'Type Approval', but to get around this, each car was sold as a standard Elise and then converted to Sport 190-spec by Lotus Special Vehicle Operations.

Although the conversion could be carried out on an existing car, the overwhelming majority of Elise built to Sport 190 specification were converted from brand new cars taken straight from the production line.

The first customer car...