2011 Lotus Evora 6 Speed Navigation!! Extra Clean!! Like New!! on 2040-cars

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Lotus hands Pastor Maldonado a new Evora S in Monaco

Being a Formula One driver has its privileges. First off, you get to drive F1 cars for a living. You get treated like royalty and fly around the world. And if you're lucky, you might get a supercar thrown at you once in a while. It all depends on which team you drive for.
Fernando Alonso, for example, has had countless Ferraris, Maseratis, Abarths and Jeeps thrown his way. Lewis Hamilton was a little disappointed not to get the keys to that rare McLaren F1 LM when he won the championship. But Pastor Maldonado just got his hands on a new Lotus Evora S.
Pastor who now, you ask? Pastor Maldonado. The first Venezuelan driver in F1, Maldonado won the GP2 title in 2010 then made the jump to F1, driving for Williams for the past three seasons, impressively winning the Spanish Grand Prix in 2012. Now he's at Lotus filling Kimi Raikkonen's seat, and took delivery of his white Evora - complete with 3.5-liter supercharged V6 and six-speed sequential gearbox - in Monte Carlo last weekend during the Monaco Grand Prix.

Lotus nearing decision on sedan versus crossover

Lotus may be comfortable for the time being developing newer and better versions of its existing sports cars, but it won't necessarily skate by on its aging product portfolio forever. According to a report from Reuters, Lotus and its Malaysian parent company DRB-Hicom are currently considering adding a new model to the British automaker's lineup. And in a further sign of the times, it seems likely that the new model would be either a sedan or crossover. "I'm a bit torn between an SUV and a four-door sports car – but in the end I can see that the SUV has the bigger market," Lotus CEO Jean-Marc Gales told Reuters. "We'd do an SUV that is very light, very fast on the track and has outstanding handling," in keeping with what Lotus is known for. It would not be the first sports car manufacturer to delve into either category, of course. Porsche rebuilt its business by expanding into both categories with models like the Panamera, Cayenne and Macan. Maserati has long offered successive versions of the Quattroporte, more recently launched the Ghibli sedan and will soon introduce the Levante crossover. Aston Martin has toyed with both, as has Lamborghini. Other marques like Ferrari and McLaren, however, remain resolutely opposed to either proposition. This past December, we reported that Lotus was preparing to go a slightly different route by offering a high-riding version of the Evora instead of a proper four-door sport-ute. This latest development, however, would appear to be quite different. The company's engineering division showcased the APX crossover concept back in 2006, and revealed the Eterne sedan concept as part of the grandiose plans of the previous Bahar administration in 2010. The last time the proposition came up this past August, nearly half of respondents to our online poll voted that Lotus should build a sedan, but not a crossover. Over a quarter of you said Lotus should built both, 2 percent voted for the crossover over the sedan, and 22 percent said Lotus should steer clear of either.

European commission investigating F1 finances and anti-competitive accusations

The Kingdom of Formula One reminds us of renaissance Florence - ruled by a singular chieftan behind a mask of representative involvement, rife with spectacularly convoluted machinations, awash in innovations that help define our world and far-flung, vindictive misery. If we found out Bernie Ecclestone's real last name was de Medici, well, it would explain a lot. Now after a bit of back-and-forth, the European Commission (EC) has taken aim at the kingdom, investigating whether F1 is anti-competitive and if the FIA has abused its antitrust agreement. The reason for EC scrutiny is that a British member of the European Parliament who represents an area in southwest England, Anneliese Dodds, has fielded complaints from engineering companies in her constituency that recent moves in F1 have put them out of business. She wrote to the EC to question why the FIA now has a stake in F1 when it signed an agreement in 2001 to be solely a governing body and abdicate any stakeholding in the sport. She also questioned the F1 Strategy Group, a group of the six top teams in F1 that makes decisions about the direction of the sport; she says that the Strategy Group not only appears to be a case of the F1 shirking its rule-making duty, it has resulted in unfair treatment of the small teams that aren't in the group. Dodds has a bit of a point. In 2001, the FIA sold F1's commercial rights to Ecclestone for 100 years for a sum of $313.7 million. That was done to placate European regulators who insisted that "the role of FIA will be limited to that of a sports regulator, with no commercial conflicts of interest." Although the rights are ultimately owned by the FIA and bring in a $10M fee every year from Formula One, those rights bring in $1.6 billion each year to Formula One Management (FOM), the company that owns F1. When Ecclestone was trying to get the new Concorde Agreement signed in 2013 that governs the running of the sport, the FIA wouldn't sign, saying it wanted F1 to share a larger slice of its revenue – the FIA has been losing money for years, see. To the get the FIA to sign, Ecclestone sold it a one-percent stake in F1 for $460,000 and gave the FIA a $5M signing 'bonus;' whenever F1 has its IPO, that stake is estimated to be worth about $120 million - not a bad return. Yet, according to the aforementioned 2001 agreement, the FIA can't have that equity stake.