PH Fleet Update: Caterham Academy Racer

Track days, road trips and decals mean a busy April for the PH Seven

Riggers wins the decal war...

It's been a busy couple of weeks for my little Caterham. The odometer has now tipped beyond 2200 miles, encouraged along by the continued absence of a trailer (to be remedied soon) and the onset of some blessedly sunny weather (long may that continue.

As a result the Seven has been pressed into service outside of its Caterham Academy duties for several commutes to airports for car launches (a detachable steering wheel must be one of the weirdest I could ever take on an aircraft as hand luggage), as well as for a Caterham owners club jaunt to the Isle of Wight.

On track for the first time

It's also taken to the track proper for the first time at an Academy-only track day at Castle Combe, providing me with the first opportunity to really stretch the car - and to make a prize fool of myself by running out of fuel on track (yes, really). But more on that later. First up, a tale of stickers, bumpy roads, surreal holiday camps, and many, many Sevens.

Wight Blat - Seven go on a road trip

Every April for the past few years, three Caterham Seven-owning chaps based on the Isle of Wight have organised a gathering of Sevens on their home island, which has become known as the Wight Blat (the gathering, not the island...).

Gathering at Caterham for the Wight Blat

Naturally, when we heard about the drily named IOWMMX, the fourth running of the Wight Blat, it seemed the perfect opportunity to see how the PH fleet Caterham Academy car would mix with its more traditional roadgoing brethren.

"Sure you can come along with us," said Andy Noble from Caterham (how many car companies go along to their own owners club meets?). "As long as you like beer and driving (though not together)." No problem there then.

We met at Caterham's showroom in, er, Caterham, with the sun miraculously shining (as it would all weekend) and with the PH Seven now fully stickered-up and finally looking like a proper racing car.

A complicated job

It had only the day before been treated to a giant custom PH smiley, applied by vinyl wrap experts Creative FX over the bonnet louvres - a sticker job that would drive most who tried it insane within minutes - as well as some yellow stripes along the wings. Of the 'official' Caterham cars, only an Austin Powers-chic Union Jack Roadsport, created for a marketing tie-in with Lambretta clothing, outshone the PH racer.

Following along at the back of the seven-car Caterham Cars convoy on the way to the Portsmouth ferry terminal highlighted just how fast some Caterhams are. And that our 125bhp 1.6-litre Ford-engined car is not one of them.

On the world's most expensive ferry

Aside from the Lambretta-Seven, everybody else had at least 15bhp more to play with - with the R500 leading the convoy sporting more than twice the power of my car. Attempting to keep up was certainly good practise for maximum-rev upshifts.

The rest of the weekend passed a little surreally. The holiday park we stayed in was like some sort of bizarre nod to cult 60s TV series The Prisoner, with every other chalet having a Seven of some sort parked outside it, while 75 or so Caterhams fill up a small place like the Isle of Wight quite easily - everywhere we drove we seemed to encounter several gaggles of them.

the Isle of Wight's roads are not exactly the smoothest or the biggest, but a Caterham is small and nimble enough to make the most of them. But for any Academy drivers (past or present) who fancy the Wight Blat, or indeed any road trip with more conventional Caterhams, a piece of advice - do yourself a favour and buy some new wheels with stickier tyres. Either that or accept that the Academy's super-hard Avon control tyres will give up any pretence of grip far sooner than any other tyre fitted to a road-going modern Caterham.

Castle Combe Academy track day

The other major activity for GN59 MWG was an Academy track day - a first chance for both myself and my fellow Caterham Academy participants (Caterham Academics?) to really stretch our cars' legs.

The chosen venue for this was the undulating, flowing Tarmac of Castle Combe in Wiltshire built, as with so many British circuits, on the perimeter roads of an old RAF base.

It's a slightly intimidating place at which to begin your on-track acquaintance with a racing car, with little in the way of run-off and some very technical corners. But we were all carefully watched by the circuit's instructors, and had strict instructions to pass on the right only and by consent, so that at least took some of the fear out of the day.

Combe was also a first chance to properly gauge ourselves against the pace of other drivers - and it looks like being a pretty competitive season. Those with previous karting or track day experience started the day being generally quicker than the greenest of novices, but after a few sessions the distinction seemed to be far more blurred - testament, I suppose, to how approachable these Academy-spec Caterhams are.

By the end of the day people were beginning to push their cars close to the limit, (and in some cases, but naming no names, beyond it). I managed to avoid a red face from facing the wrong way.

Feeling a little fuel-ish...

Instead I suffered a far more embarrassing fate, running out of fuel part-way through the last session. I won't go into the details of exactly how acutely embarrassing that is, but let's just say that the sensation of being towed back to the pits is not something I wish to repeat.

The first competitive event is a sprint this weekend at Aintree, and my nerves are building already. Fortunately the course is just 1847 metres long, so running out of fuel should not be a problem...

^{Track day photos: Rachel Horgan}

Some of Riggers's rivals - none of whom ran out of petrol...

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