Last month's evo had barely hit the shelves before Gavan Kershaw (Lotus's ace chassis development engineer) was on the phone with an answer to our tyre problems: 'Got just the tyre for you. Been testing alternatives to the A038 up here at Lotus and if it's excellent road grip you want with good wet weather performance you need Yokohama Advan Neovas. We fitted the 340R with A038's,' Kershaw continued, 'because they're the ultimate dry weather trackday tyre, thinking the car would never get used in the wet, what with no roof and so on. But that didn't account for the changeable British weather and so we've had another look at alternatives, and we've come up with these.'

What's interesting is that Yokohama actually finalise the spec of the tyres with Kershaw up at Hethel, tweaking compounds and construction according to Lotus's input. Gavan admits it's all a black art to him; he's just asked to set times and give feedback to the Japanese engineers. At the last test he was amazed he was 0.3sec quicker through one corner just because the radial belt construction was slightly different on one set compared with the other.

The net result of all this testing is that Yokohama now has specific tyres for Lotus ΂- just look for the tell-tale 'LTS' stamp on the tyre wall. They're worth searching for because the Elise in all its variants tends to be that much lighter than other cars so it can wear softer compound tyres than those suited to other, heavier machines.

As to the new tyres' performance; it's a guarded thumbs-up at the moment, since I've only covered around 200 miles with them and Gavan warned me that Yokohamas need a fair bit of running-in since they seem to stay greasier for longer than other makes. I can vouch for that as I had a quick blat round the Bedford Autodrome in the wet when they were just 150 miles old and they felt horrid compared with the A038s, which could generate surprising grip in the damp if there was no standing water about. So we'll have to do a decent mileage on the Yokos before a meaningful verdict. Well, Gavan can't have all the fun...