Lotus Esprit S1 Part 3 - Trim another day

Part 3 of this series, and we are tackling the retrim for the Esprit.

For a smaller vehicle, there is still plenty to retrim. We have the roof lining, the bulkhead, A, B, C pillars, the dashboard, the centre console, both seats, door cards, carpets, mats, sun visors, a switch panel, a new touch screen, and plenty more...

In this part we will go through the retrim for some of these key areas, explaining the materials, how we go about retrimming a vehicle of this age with next to no photo references, and what the customer intends to do with the car when it is complete.

These Lotus seats arrived to us trimmed but were not to the standard the vehicle owner wanted. They were complete, with no tears or damage, they just did not fit 100% leaving room for improvement on the retrim. So we stripped the seats leaving just the frames and built them back up, reusing the foams as they were in great condition, as mentioned in part 2.

Once this was sorted, it was time to start building the sets back up, starting with the materials. For this retrim we had to make a fair few phone calls searching for a supplier who had this material available. Turns out this proved difficult and a new batch of the red and green tartan was made.

Onto the main feature of these seats, the padded flutes on the seat centres. A mix of foams creates these flutes which make these seats very unique, a common sight on our usual Mercedes-Benz content, however on this lotus they are spread out, and horizontal. Compared to the previous retrim, the way we have created them is to perfectly line up the flutes with the lines found in the tartan. It's all in the details. Red twin stitching completes this seat retrim.

A stand-out feature for this project is the centre console's "radar" screen. The car originally had a makeshift screen with some stickers, referencing the gadgets found in The Spy Who Loved Me Lotus. But we weren't happy to do the same for our customer, so we present to you a bespoke screen and housing, featuring a radar with bleeping, parking camera, Apple/Android CarPlay, and dash cam. The bespoke housing, which is trimmed, is to pay homage to the bond car by fitting in and looking like it would of belonged in the film.

These door cards feature the same tartan found on the seat centres, just a little smaller but equally as important. To complete the style of this very unique interior, the orange, green, and red should not really work together but somehow do. The three of them together scream 70s, and we are all for it. A classic piece of British automotive history, no other Esprit interiors even come close to this.