My exhaust cracked. Looks to me metal fatigue. Loathsome part and it won’t be missed. Upon examination, I do not believe it was a stock piece.
I’m electing to have a local fabricator tack on some straight pipe from the cats. The ramp to the lift has sadly claimed my chin spoiler. That was aggravating, and will probably end up being costly…
There are folks out there that believe the muffler was an aerodynamic piece. Maybe it is, but my 175 mile an hour days are pretty much over. I’ll take the loss of weight and heat soak with joy. It was always my intention to abandon the muffler and its kind of nice to have the excuse.
Oddly, it won’t end up much louder. The folks at Lotus have, (and bless them for this) always treated exhausts with measurable contempt, and most of the owners (well, the ones i care to be around, anyway) really enjoy hearing them scream.
Additionally, somehow over the course of the winter, the radio elected to stop working. This, is an issue as my wife refuses to ride in a car without her tunes. I cannot blame her although it would have likely been several years before I noticed the failure myself. I’ve spent some time looking at fuses and found nothing, so we will dig a little deeper.
It’s going to spend some more time on lifts this year. We have a lot of issues to deal with mostly from “lack of use” abuse, and it’s always better to sort little issues before they are big ones.
I have resigned myself to paying up for tooling. Evidently there is nothing out there to be had, and that bothers me. C’est la vie.
Conversations with my Esprit 
Before you do that check out Stebro exhausts. I put one on my 89 Esprit back in 95. When it blew out in 200? I contacted Stebro and they repaired and repacked it for free. Excellent sound and about 66% lighter than the OEM unit.