From: Jon Reade
Subject: Elise Attention Stories...
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 17:52:45 +0100
This is a biggy...
RE :
>From: Rhys Williams <RHYSW@directories.co.nz>
>Subject: RE: Elise on Sydney Streets
>Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 16:52:50 +1200
>I use my car every day in Auckland - it does seem to get a bit of >attention - I don' think that it is the soft top off in mid-winter that >gets the attention either! >It was the same in London - I even had a Dude in bright orange jacket >come up to me at the lights and say, "Yo man, your not driving past me >without me saying thats one Mother of a car!".
I just had to laugh when you relayed this experience, having had similar too, both at home and abroad (I'm a Brit working in Europe). One woman in Luxembourg nearly crashed her car in the city centre trying to drive and focus her camera at the same time ! But the oddest experience was at the end of April, in southern Belgium in the middle of a huge forest about 30 miles from anywhere. The roads down there are ideal for a car an Elise, lots and lots of bends, fantastic countryside.
It was around sunset - 8pm - and I passed most of a line of cars headed by a French registered Peugeot 205 1.9 GTi with four young lads in it. As they came out of a bend (at a fair old pace), I passed, then left them as we got into some seriously winding forest roads, thinking I'd seen the last of them...
About four miles later, with nothing on the road infront or behind, I hit a set of road works where the lights had just turned red. A minute later, the 205 Pug' pulls up behind me.
Then the doors open.
Then the lads jump out and run up to the Elise (which has a GB sticker on the rear window, so a hint that I *might* just not speak much French!).
Then, they start excitedly asking me questions, in very fast French, pointing to the car, looking underneath it, walking around it, the works.
One of them runs back to the 205, then returns, manically waving a pic of a yellow Elise, which I just about manage to figure out he's photographed at the Geneva motor show. The questions continue for a good while, the lights turn green, then red and eventually back to green again. By this point, the other cars I passed have caught up with us. A small queue has built up and I sense people may be getting a *little* frustrated. After more "discussion", I finally take off, more out of courtesy to the other drivers than any real wish to, this time leaving the 205 behind permanently.
It was only a few miles up the road that it occurred to me what had happened : by myself, with the top down in the middle of nowhere in a country I don't speak the language of, on the edge of night surrounded by four lads. If it had happened in another car, particularly back home, I'd have been very worried! Yet their enthusiasm for the car was so evident, the encounter seemed in no way threatening. An odd, probably unrepeatable and almost surreal experience I'll remember for a very long time..... if you're out there reading this guys, thankyou!
Jon Reade.
'97 Lotus Elise (Racing Green)