There is a bottle of Glenfiddich on sale in a Heathrow airport whisky shop that you can buy for the knockdown, duty-free price of £10,000. The difference between it and an approximately £9,980 cheaper bottle of Glenfiddich is that it was distilled 71 years ago rather than the usual 12. It is the most extreme example I have yet found of limited-edition marketing. I’ve not tried 1937 Glenfiddich but I feel as certain as I can be that it won’t taste 500 times as good as the standard malt. Despite which, someone will buy it – as a conversation piece or so as to stand apart from the crowd.

As a broad rule of thumb, few of the good things in life are ever improved by embellishment. No great painting was ever made greater by a florid frame, nor any beautiful woman made more beautiful still by the application of heavy make-up. And it’s the same with cars. You only have to look at one of the greatest of them all, the Jaguar E-type, and observe its downward spiral into bloated self-parody, to know that more power does not always mean more fun, and that bigger is often far from better.

Although it may not yet be widely appreciated, the Lotus Elise is another one of those great cars, the size of whose contribution to the history of sports cars is often underestimated. Leaving aside the fact that, without the Elise, one of the world’s most important and innovative sports car marques would no longer exist, its design shows how principles of engineering simplicity have held true over the decades. In an era in which sports cars are becoming increasingly flabby, the Elise is an example of lightweight purity, true to to the vision of Colin Chapman, the maverick genius who founded Lotus more than half a century ago.

These days a few hours spent on a good road in the company of Lotus’s cheapest car, the basic Elise S, remains one of the finest pleasures you can have on wheels. There is no Ferrari on sale with steering as fluent and faithful, nor is there a Porsche with a more agile chassis. I believe it is the best-handling car on sale, and, at £24,500, one of the most conspicuous bargains.

So there I was at Heathrow, browsing in a whisky shop and waiting to board a plane to Barcelona. The Elise awaiting me in Spain was the new SC model, the extra suffix letter standing for “compressor”, and revealing that the 1.8 litre Toyota engine used by the S has been supercharged to raise power from 134bhp to 220bhp. Despite using exactly the same chassis, gearbox and brakes as the Elise S, it costs £33,500, and my fear was that it would be to the basic Elise what the overpriced Glenfiddich was to the basic malt.

Of course, supercharging is not new to Lotus, indeed the Exige coupé now has a supercharged engine similar in design to that of this Elise. But the Exige is a brutal, hard-edged track-day warrior whose character ideally suits the sledgehammer delivery of its supercharged motor.

By contrast, the Elise is a road car through and through, a delicate driving delight, and I struggled to see how bolting a supercharger to its engine was going to do anything other than harm. Back in 1929, another great British car engineer, WO Bentley, said that to supercharge one of his engines was “to pervert its design and corrupt its performance”, and as I approached the Elise SC, I suspected his words would again ring true.

Naturally, I was enchanted by the car. The team from Lotus had sensibly sought some tight, challenging mountain roads to display the Elise’s usual talents to perfection, and I spent a delightful afternoon driving fast but not furiously, pushing the car hard enough to feel it slide just a little at each end, but never feeling tempted to behave like a hooligan. Some cars want a fight, and that can be very invigorating and challenging, but the

Elise is a car that wants to play, and that was just fine by me.

The supercharger doesn’t just make it much quicker, dropping the 0-60mph time from 5.8sec to 4.4sec, it provides a substantially bigger punch at all points in the rev range, so there’s much less gearchanging to be done. I drove an entire mountain pass – up and down – using just two of its six gears, and I didn’t do this as a test, but simply because that was the way the car felt at its happiest.

But although I arrived at the bottom sooner than I would had I been driving a standard Elise S, not once during the journey did I feel the basic car would have felt less than its equal. If a car has a good gearbox, as do all Elises, changing gear adds to the fun. Also, the supercharged engine may punch like a heavyweight, but it sounds undistinguished, and while it will spin to 8500rpm, there’s no sense of increasing urgency as the revs rise. There’s just linear power from start to finish, and I’d have preferred more variety than that.

It is the Elise SC’s great misfortune that the Elise S exists, for if it didn’t, I’d be swooning over it. As it is, it proves yet again what Colin Chapman knew from the very start: when it comes to building a sports car, less is often more.

And I hope someone writes that phrase in letters 10ft tall at Lotus’s Norfolk factory, for the company is this year embarking on its most ambitious new model plan since the 1970s. After 12 years of selling the Elise and its derivatives, the final touches are being put to the Eagle, a Lotus new from the wheels up. It will be bigger than the Elise, more luxurious, and will be the first Lotus in 15 years to be equipped with rear seats. Power will come from a V6 Toyota engine mounted behind the seats, and the car will be built using the bonded aluminium construction technology that makes the Elise so strong yet so light.

It will come in various guises – a coupé will likely be first, followed by a convertible, and with prices starting at around £45,000, it will be pitched directly at the fabulously capable Porsche Cayman S, which may well prove as stern a test of the new British sports car as could be conceived.

Vital statistics

Model Lotus Elise SC

Engine type 1796cc, four cylinders

Power/Torque 220bhp @ 8000rpm / 156 lb ft @ 5100rpm

Transmission Six-speed manual

Fuel/CO2 33.0mpg (combined cycle) / 202g/km

Acceleration 0-60mph: 4.4sec

Top speed 150mph

Price £33,500

Verdict Great, but basic Elise is cheaper and just as good

Rating

Date of release Now

The opposition

Model Porsche Boxster £33,375

For Fast, fun, good to drive, even better to own

Against Ubiquity, cramped cabin, unremarkable looks

Model BMW Z4 Roadster 3.0Si Sport £34,930

For Strong engine, good performance, well built

Against Handling and ride good but unexceptional