About Us

Silicon Valley Lotus Specialists

Suspension Performance is the premier independent Lotus service and upgrade shop in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We have over 200 customers who drive a Lotus Elise, Exige or 2Eleven.

We are a full-service shop, offering maintenance, performance upgrades, and crash repair of your Lotus. We do more than suspension!

We also service the Alfa Romeo 4C and many mid-engine sports cars.

About Eric Gauthier

Eric Gauthier, owner of Suspension Performance, worked for Lotus Team in the early 1990s. He was a key member of the design team for active suspension, a ground-breaking innovation in F1 cars.

Eric later worked at Lotus Engineering, where he designed the front suspension of the Series 1 Elise.

With Suspension Performance, you have a rare opportunity to have your car prepped and maintained by someone who:

  • understands suspension theory
    • Master’s degree in suspension engineering from Grenoble Institute of Technology (“the MIT of France”)
  • understands racing
    • Ten years professional motorcycle racing experience
    • French Enduro champion
    • Two Paris-Dakkar finishes
  • understands and practices the art of design
    • Three  years at Lotus factory & F1 team
    • Consultant to global manufacturers on suspension and brake designs

We are a family business

Eric’s wife, Jeannine, handles all the marketing, accounting, and computer geek tasks for Suspension Performance.

Jeannine is a semi-retired software engineer, who now advises software startup companies.

Jeannine owns a lightly modified Lotus Elise. As you can see in this photo, her competitive side sometimes surfaces, and she has been known to chase Eric around the track, working to reduce the 15-second time difference between her best lap time and his.

Our toys

Our personal car collection includes:

  • Jeannine’s 2005 Elise road car, full of upgrades
  • 2008 Ford F450 truck, for hauling our 48′ trailer
  • 2012 Fisker Karma, Eric’s daily driver
  • 2016 Jaguar F-Type, Jeannine’s daily driver (manual transmission of course)
  • 2006 Audi S4 Avant wagon, our family hauler (yup, it’s a manual)
  • 1959 dune buggy project, finally complete
  • 2008 Ford Econoline camper van project, mostly complete

Eric is rumored to own 20+ motorcycles, but no one is quite sure since they are never all in one place at one time. His traditional favorite for off-road riding is his custom full-size 85cc TM enduro bike. Eric took delivery of the very first production Redshift,  an electric motocross bike from Alta Motors, and he now owns three of them.