This Safari-Spec Lotus Elise Wants You To Get Lost, Literally

Get Lost! No, we’re not being rude, and we’d really rather you didn’t get lost – that’d be bad for our retention figures. We’re talking about capital-G, capital-L Get Lost, a new UK-based brand that’s kicking things off with Project Safari, a jacked-up, rally-stage friendly reimagining of the Series 1 Lotus Elise – and doesn’t it just look like the most fun you could possibly have on four wheels?

Get Lost was founded by automotive photographer George Williams, AKA GFWilliams, who’s no stranger to turning up the wick a bit on Lotuses – you might be familiar with ‘Hell Slow’, his heavily modified purple Exige V6.

Project Safari, though, is a very different beast. The nascent company says it’s been designed above all else for road tripping on pretty much any surface – getting lost, if you will. Sitting wider and higher on all-terrain tyres, the off-road suspension setup is completely bespoke to the car, and that’s not the only mechanical change – it now runs a proper limited-slip diff at the back, and – oh yes – a rally-style hydraulic handbrake.

To accommodate that new suspension, Project Safari gets some enormously flared arches, while another visual change you can’t really miss is that enormous new roof scoop to feed air into what we assume is still the standard 1.8-litre Rover K-Series engine. Elsewhere, there are new LED headlights plus a set of painfully cool rally spotlights, and that awesome spare wheel carrier on the rear deck.

We don’t know any other specifics at the moment, but Get Lost promises it all works to create an all-terrain package that nevertheless loses none of the ultra-crisp handling that made the original Elise such a special thing.

Company founder George Williams has this to say: “The idea of taking an Elise off-road might sound ridiculous, and that’s exactly why we leaned into it. That one silly idea gave us real creative freedom. Every element was considered from the ground up, not just to look good in isolation, but to enhance the character and capability of the entire car.”

Should this slice of madness appeal to you – and assuming you have a pulse, we really can’t see why it wouldn’t – Get Lost is now accepting registrations of interest, and plans to start work on the first customer cars later this year. We’re already daydreaming about where we’d take ours.

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The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.

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