Zero doors, no roof, weighs next to nothing – it's absolutely scary to push a Lotus 3-Eleven to its top speed limit. And yet, the folks from AutoTopNL weren't unfazed by those facts and have tested one for today's feature.
Introduced in 2015, the Lotus 3-Eleven is a speedster that arrived in two flavors: one racing version and one road-legal. The former is naturally more powerful but that doesn't mean that the road-legal version was a slacker.
Gallery: Lotus 3-Eleven 430
Only 311 units of the original 3-Eleven were made. In 2018, a more powerful version, the Lotus 3-Eleven 430, was introduced.
The 3-Eleven that went through the top speed run on the unrestricted sections of the German Autobahn was one of the 311. It's powered by a 3.5-liter Toyota 2GR-FE V6 mill coupled to an Edelbrock Roots-type supercharger. Total output is rated at 410 horsepower (306 kilowatts) and 302 pound-feet (410 Newton-meters) of torque for the road-legal version, tipping the scales at 2,039 pounds (925 kilograms).
Meanwhile, the track-only version makes 460 hp (343 kW) and 387 lb-ft (525 Nm) through some revisions, along with weight savings necessary to make the speedster run even faster. The more powerful, road-legal Lotus 3-Eleven 430 churns out 430 hp (321 kW), hence the name.
The top speed of the road-legal 3-Eleven that was tested was supposedly 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour). But as you can see in the video, the driver failed the attempt to reach that speed. He was only able to clock in 168 mph (270 km/h), which wasn't exactly a shabby attempt, considering that he had to do that with wind on his face. Scary, but fun, nonetheless.
