2021 Lotus Evora GT First Test: The Cayman Fighter It Always Should’ve Been

Let's go back 10 years, to when I waged a losing battle to see the Lotus Evora S ranked any higher than dead last during MotorTrend's first Best Driver's Car competition (especially when the BMW 1M warped its brakes). The car was rough around the edges, but it held enough promise, enough charm in how it drove, to look past some of its foibles. I was perhaps a little blinded by the Lotus mythos and the allure of an exotic-ish, mid-engine, manually shifted sports car—but it did have enormous potential. It took a decade to get here, but the 2021 Lotus Evora GT is every bit the Porsche Cayman fighter it should've been from the start.

Granted, there were plenty of little fixes to be had. The original Evora won high praise from our editors for its handling on the street, but driving the Evora S on a track revealed unpredictable behavior at the limit. It tended to snap into big off-throttle oversteer during corner entry, which transitioned to mild on-power understeer when you caught it and went back to power. But not in every corner. 

The 2021 Lotus Evora GT puts an end to the sketchiness. Its tires need some heat before they offer strong grip, so the first two or three laps of our figure-eight test course were a bit wild. But there's plenty of grip once the rubber heats up, with mild understeer midcorner and modest oversteer on the exits. Overall, the Evora GT is super communicative and playful without being harsh or threatening.

Lotus delivers an impressive balancing act with the Evora GT. The Evora's ability to deliver serious performance without beating up its driver has always been its greatest strength. Such performance has increased demonstrably during the past decade, and comfort has actually improved.

Ten years ago, our pro driver Randy Pobst noted how much he needed to slow his steering inputs into corners in order to keep the car reasonably stable; this time around, we noted how much steering we could and had to use in our performance testing. As a result, the car feels less twitchy and is easier to drive every day. 

We complained all those years ago about the pedals being positioned too far to the right, with the throttle obstructed partially by the center console. We also disliked the nonsensical lack of a dead pedal. Both gripes have now been addressed; the pedals in the 2021 Lotus Evora GT are perfect for performance driving, heel-toe downshifts, and easy commuting alike. The Evora's shifter used to be too sloppy and its throws too long. Now, it's so tight you can feel the gears and synchros engage through the cable-actuating lever, so much so you need to be a bit deliberate with your shifts, or you'll reach too far for the gear you want.

The Evora GT's handling and controls aren't the only notable upgrades; every performance metric has improved dramatically. Power is up by 71 horsepower, torque by 22 lb-ft compared to the 2011 model, and the car's 0-60-mph time of 4.0 seconds is a half-second quicker—though not the 3.8 seconds Lotus advertises, at least not in our testing. The quarter-mile time improves from 12.9 to 12.4 seconds, the Evora GT traveling 3.4- mph faster, at 113.3 mph. Lateral grip on the skidpad improves by an average of 0.07 g, to 1.04. The Evora's figure-eight lap time quickens by 0.8 second, to 23.6; average g improves by 0.02, to 0.84. Braking from 60 to 0 mph requires just 99 feet, a 3-foot improvement that moves the Evora into the supercar club. The 2021 Lotus Evora GT accomplishes all of this while weighing only 21 pounds less than the old car, mostly due to its $10,000 Extended Carbon Pack. 

Ten-grand is a lot of money for a claimed weight savings of 49 pounds compared to today's standard Evora, but it buys you more than that. Drive one Evora GT with the Extended Carbon Pack and one without, and the lighter car proves itself more engaging. There's something slightly clinical about the standard Evora, but when you remove nearly a bag's worth of cement from the roof, rear hatch, rear bumper, and hood, the Lotus develops a distinctly more playful personality: It digs into corners a little more purposefully and dances off of them with a bit more pizzazz. 

Lotus probably could've left the weight on the hood. With a 61 percent rear weight bias, the 2021 Evora GT tends to get a bit light on the nose at triple-digit speeds, which is mildly disconcerting when the road is bumpy. This is the only time bumps so much as faze the car, however. Not surprisingly, the comfortable suspension offers a good amount of travel and compliance, so impacts are never painful and never upset the chassis balance. Over particularly big midcorner bumps at high speeds, you can hear and feel the suspension on the outside wheels running through its range of motion, but the Evora never loses its grip.

Stability control never spoils the fun, either; if you told us Lotus didn't offer it, we'd believe you until we remembered it's legally mandated. But the system is amazingly hands-off: You can literally do donuts in an empty parking lot without it taking control. And so much grip is available on a winding road, the stability control doesn't have anything to do, anyway.

It's not like you're moving too slow to trigger stability control, either. The speed this car carries in a corner is remarkable, which is especially good because it feels so light, you usually end up entering the corner traveling faster than you planned. Really overcook it, and you get the slightest hint of understeer, but go to power at the exit, and the Evora GT plants its tires and goes. Act a fool, and you can kick the rear end out, but drive like you know what you're doing, and you can put every bit of the supercharged power to the ground.

Such accelerative traction is another Evora high point Lotus managed to retain. The company also made sure not to mess with the excellent brakes. The discs are steel, but the brakes have incredible stopping power and fade resistance, so much so you can see why Lotus didn't bother with a carbon-ceramic setup. Likewise, the company's slavish devotion to hydraulically assisted steering is admirable when its reputation is built on weight savings. The Evora GT's steering feel and feedback are unmatched in modern cars, and they're not far off the feeling you get from a manual rack, other than in steering weight. That's not hyperbole: We drove a sports car with unassisted steering back to back with the Evora GT, and the Lotus really is that good.

Of course, that's not to say Lotus perfected everything. At $99,150 to start, an aftermarket Alpine touchscreen stereo is a tough sell, even if it has Apple CarPlay and works pretty well by aftermarket standards. The same goes for the old-school combination of a physical key you must insert into the ignition and twist, followed by pushing the engine-start button on the top left corner of the dash once the gauges complete their startup dance. Tiny, dim, black-and-white displays in the gauges themselves betray the car's age, as does the lack of automatic climate control. None of these choices saves any weight, so there's no performance advantage to justify them.

A great-driving sports car can make you forgive a lot. The Evora's optional automatic transmission isn't good enough for us to have considered it for our recent manual-versus-manual/automatic-versus-automatic comparison of the BMW M2 CS and the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4. But narrow the context to manuals only, and it's a compelling thought experiment. The Evora GT lands right on top of the BMW and Porsche in every performance metric, and it's priced similarly to the Cayman. From the driver's seat, the experience falls between the two: It's not quite as exciting as the BMW but is more engaging at all speeds than the Porsche, which only came alive at the bleeding edge of its capability.

After 10 long years of slow, erratic improvement, the 2021 Lotus Evora GT leaves the market after 2021, just as it has finally realized its potential as a legitimate Cayman fighter. It remains imperfect in that oh so charming way Lotus gets away with thanks to an exceptional driving experience. But in a world full of mass-produced Porsches and BMWs, it's hard to say no to a hand-built car that does all the same things and draws a crowd, too.