Lotus 98T

Among the 104 Lotus Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the Lotus 98T holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Lotus 98T, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lotus 98T reads like this: quoted output is 800-900 hp (race-spec), 1,000-1,200+ hp (qualifying-trim) @ 12,500 rpm; kerb weight is recorded at 540 kg. Worked together, those figures give roughly 1481 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Lotus Cars story

Within Lotus Cars's own catalogue the Lotus 98T sits alongside the Lotus 100T, the Lotus 101, the Lotus 102, the Lotus 107. The record names the 97T as its predecessor and the 99T as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Gérard Ducarouge (Technical Director) / Martin Ogilvie (Chief Designer) / Mike Coughlan (Assistant Chief Designer) / John Davis (Head of Aerodynamics and R&D) / Bernard Dudot (Chie.

On the record

The Lotus 98T also has a competition record: 2 recorded wins from 16 starts and 0 championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Lotus 98T was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.