Colin Chapman had been working with Martin Ogilvie on the 92's design before his sudden death in December 1982. The car retained the Ford Cosworth DFY V8 engine, a refined derivative of the legendary DFV that Lotus had introduced to Formula One back in 1967. In choosing to continue with the Cosworth unit for at least part of the 1983 campaign, Lotus found itself in a transitional position: the turbo era was sweeping through the field, and the team was simultaneously developing its first turbocharged car, the Renault-powered Lotus 93T.
The most notable technical feature of the 92 was its active suspension system, an experimental setup that replaced conventional passive springs and dampers with computer-controlled actuators capable of adjusting the car's ride height and attitude in real time. In practice the system proved troublesome during the 1983 season, generating persistent reliability problems and, more damagingly, nearly eroding Nigel Mansell's confidence in active suspension technology altogether. The difficulties encountered with the 92 made the concept seem like a dead end at the time, though Mansell would eventually go on to win the 1992 Formula One World Championship in the Williams FW14B — a car whose dominant active suspension he celebrated enthusiastically, vindicating the idea a decade on.
Nigel Mansell was the 92's primary driver throughout its stint in the 1983 season. Elio de Angelis drove it on one occasion, the 1983 Brazilian Grand Prix, after engine problems on his warm-up lap forced him out of his Renault-powered 93T and into the spare Cosworth car. De Angelis was subsequently disqualified for the switch from a Renault-engined car to a Cosworth-engined one — an outcome that underlined the administrative complexity of running two very different power units within the same team.
The 92's best competitive result was a sixth-place finish for Mansell at the Detroit Grand Prix, a street circuit where mechanical traction and chassis balance mattered as much as outright power, softening the disadvantage of the normally aspirated engine. Mansell also scored a championship point in the same race, a result that contributed to Lotus-Ford's constructors' tally separately from the team's Renault-engined points.
The Lotus 92 stands as the closing chapter of an era. It was the last non-turbocharged car that Lotus designed and raced until the FIA banned turbo engines ahead of the 1989 season, and the last Lotus to use the Cosworth DFY. Its troubled active suspension experiment, though painful in execution, placed Team Lotus at the frontier of chassis technology — a frontier that the whole of Formula One would cross in earnest by the early 1990s. The 92 was succeeded for the latter part of 1983 by the Renault-powered Lotus 94T, which offered the team a more competitive footing in the turbocharged landscape.