Back in April...
Discussion
... I hired a 1600 Supersport (from Scotty996T). I took some pictures on the day and went on to write an article about the experience. It was never published by the publications I sent it to, so I thought I'd upload it here. If this is against the rules, then apologies and I'll remove it.
Tim
P.S. Please correct me on mechanical technicalities because I think I've got some wrong!
'SPECIAL K'
- Words and Photographs: Tim Watson -
2005: Following the demise of Rover, Caterham began to phase out the K-Series engine – a light and tuneable unit that had helped them to create some of the best received cars in their long line-up.
April 2010, Stamford Bridge, North Yorkshire: I arrived at Roadsport Hire, an official Caterham hire centre for the North of England, just before 8am to be warmly greeted by Lynda McFie, joint owner of V12 BRO, the bright yellow Caterham Supersport that I’d be hiring for the day. After a chat, a briefing, and signing the official stuff, the double garage door opened to reveal my car - endowed with a 1.6 litre K-Series engine and an ordinarily modest 135bhp. Its stable-mate is a 1.8 litre 140bhp Supersport SV (in Ferrari Grigio Titanium). It didn’t take long to have the switchgear explained because there’s hardly any of it to explain. This, of course, meant that I could set off all the sooner.
Still in the garage, but now sitting low down in the car, gripped reassuringly tight by the four point harness, I pressed the little red starter-button. The engine almost exploded into life with a deep BOOM that resonated round the garage, and then subsided to leave a sound to be described, euphemistically, as ‘lumpy at idle’.
And that was it. I pulled out of the stone driveway, hoping to retain my sense of masculinity by not stalling or bunny-hopping down the road. Masculinity luckily intact, I set off for what would be ten hours of the most varied and enthralling driving I’ve ever experienced.
For the first half hour, though, I was slightly nervous. It was raining and there was mud on the roads. Slippery mud. Slippery greasy mud. I had the canvas hood on and the cabin was more than a little warm. My right arm was soaked from water coming up the sidescreen. The wind had pulled some poppers off the hood where it meets the windscreen after only a couple of miles and I had visions of the whole thing flying off. The thought crossed my mind that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
Nevertheless, my plan was to get to know the car and take it easy from Stamford Bridge to Beverley, where I work, and then drive the 20-odd mile commute from work to my home near Goole. I wanted to compare the experience in the Caterham, like-for-like, with that of my MX-5. Then, to travel to a couple of photograph locations I’d been eyeing up in the previous days, and take out my brother-in-law, who is staunchly in the ‘performance by MORE POWER’ camp and who I was secretly hoping to convert.
Driving those first few miles was an altogether alien experience – the immediacy of the Supersport’s reaction to even the slightest steering and throttle inputs, the volume of the induction and exhaust, the strange and seemingly random mechanical noises coming from unlocateable parts of the car - and I was tense. I realised that I wouldn’t enjoy the day ahead of me if I stayed like that. So I relaxed. I relaxed into the seat and relaxed my hands on the steering wheel. And then something amazing happened: all of a sudden, I found myself receiving feedback about everything that was going on under the wheels, through the seat and through the perfectly sized 260mm Momo steering wheel. Of course, this had been happening all the time; I was just too tense to notice it. The little Caterham turned from scary to my best friend in a matter of seconds.
The steering feedback is plentiful, but isn’t as subtle or nuanced as a modern-day Lotus’s. Strangely though, you don’t need pin-sharp steering feel in this car. The beauty is that you just know, intuitively and exactly, how much grip you have and how the chassis is balanced. Somehow it’s the whole of the vehicle that communicates to you.
On full-attack mode it’s nothing short of brutal. The Rover-sourced motor pulls from low down (say, 1500rpm) but at about 5,000 revs, the engine note hardens considerably. Not just louder, but more intense. The acceleration isn’t quite violent but is still very satisfying. You know that it’s always on tap too, because the gearing is so short. And all with a noise that assaults your eardrums. ‘Brrrraaaaa’-(pause, change gear, breathe)-‘Brrrraaaaa’. It’s not an angry engine note, or thrashy like some 4 cylinder engines can be. More, just, hard-as-nails. At this state of tune, the engine feels both strong and quite happy to rev. Even up between 7000-8000 rpm, it doesn’t feel like you’re wringing its neck. I had heard of K-Series engines being peaky (in Seven application), but this 135bhp version had a broader torque band than I’d imagined. So much so that there’s actually not much point holding your foot in till the needle reaches the red line.
Here lies one of its downsides though. At one point I was cruising at the (unofficial) motorway speed limit in sixth gear, I looked down to read nearly 5,000 revs on the dial. Without earplugs, that noise would soon become very wearing. Luckily, I’d had some ‘attenuating’ earplugs made when I was playing in a band a few years back, and they didn’t half come in handy. I would have no qualms about driving long distances with them in.
There is another sort of pleasure to be had; a gentler side to the Caterham. Selecting sixth at 50mph and leaving it there, I meandered over and down the hills and valleys of East Yorkshire, taking in the villages as I passed through – each one leaving me with a memory of the Seven. At this sort of pace, it’s not that different from the Mazda in ride quality. Yes, you feel all the bumps and undulations of the road, but it’s certainly not harsh or crashy. And when you’re not going all-out, you also have time to soak up the atmosphere and all the sensory messages that come to you just by being in the car.
This car is running with 6-inch tyres all round. I talked to Scott McFie, the owner of V12 BRO, about the choice of tyres, and we both agreed that for a road car, anything wider at the rear would lessen the amount of fun you had. On track, where what matters is maximum grip, wider tyres would be a necessity. But on the road, the goal is not shaving tenths of seconds off your trip; it’s the enjoyment, and the feeling of floating through corners with the rear wheels slipping just adds to the magic.
Skip forward several hours past more rain, sunshine, laughter, raised thumbs, immobiliser antics, motorways and single track lanes… to 6pm. It was now about an hour before I was due to drop the Caterham off with its owners, and I decided to have one last fling. This time I headed north out of Stamford Bridge, to the fairy-tale-pretty village of Buttercrambe, and then beyond (on an unnumbered B-road) to Malton. I stumbled on it by chance, but wow, what a road. By this time the sun had been shining for a while, the sky was blue and the tarmac had completely dried out.
Every once in a while - and there doesn’t seem to be a scientific or repeatable formula for when it happens - everything seems to come together, and you just take a road apart. This was one of those times. With my earplugs in, I could hear both the sound of the engine, charging up through the gears with that ever-insistent note, but also the sound of my own breathing. It was a hypnotic, dream-like experience.
The Caterham seems to enjoy being thrown around. It’s up to anything you can do to it (barring lunacy) and will respond playfully to inputs that would have almost any other car seriously unsettled. I know it’s a cliché but you really do grab it by the scruff of the neck. This car was specced with an optional lightweight flywheel, the effect of which is an increase in engine braking and a corresponding increase in the smoothness with which you string corners together. On some long stretches of twisty road I didn’t need to use the brake at all. Deliberately backing off the throttle on entering a corner, you can feel the balance of the car shift significantly, but because of its light weight, low centre of gravity and wide track (this Supersport also has the widened Superlight suspension upgrade package) there’s none of the usual accompanying body roll, so it’s always working at its optimum and never feels overloaded.
Leaning harder than ever into corners, feeding in the accelerator to its stop on seeing the exit, the rear wheels shimmy before fully straightening up to blast up the next straight, and all the while, the little car working its socks off. This is farming country and fields are being ploughed, so there were dusty patches of dried mud from tractor wheels, and sometimes loose gravel mid corner. In a lot of cars when the back steps out suddenly, you make a kind of reactive ‘flinch’ for opposite lock. With the Caterham, though, it seems to happen in slow motion, predictably, and with no cause for concern. And just as I had found out early in the day, I now realised even more fundamentally at higher speeds that the Seven responds better to a light grip on the steering wheel and when it’s allowed to find its own way through a corner – slip, grip and all.
I could have been driving for ten minutes or two hours - I wouldn’t have known. Time seemed to disappear. Eventually arriving on the outskirts of Stamford Bridge, my fun had come to an end. But that didn’t matter. I’d already witnessed what a sublimely controllable and utterly involving car this 135bhp K-series Caterham is. Brother-in-law safely converted, the single best drive of my life (that last hour) completed, it was time to return V12 BRO to its owners Scott and Lynda, and head home. Oh how I slept that night. I don’t remember my head hitting the pillow.
TW
Tim
P.S. Please correct me on mechanical technicalities because I think I've got some wrong!
'SPECIAL K'
- Words and Photographs: Tim Watson -
2005: Following the demise of Rover, Caterham began to phase out the K-Series engine – a light and tuneable unit that had helped them to create some of the best received cars in their long line-up.
April 2010, Stamford Bridge, North Yorkshire: I arrived at Roadsport Hire, an official Caterham hire centre for the North of England, just before 8am to be warmly greeted by Lynda McFie, joint owner of V12 BRO, the bright yellow Caterham Supersport that I’d be hiring for the day. After a chat, a briefing, and signing the official stuff, the double garage door opened to reveal my car - endowed with a 1.6 litre K-Series engine and an ordinarily modest 135bhp. Its stable-mate is a 1.8 litre 140bhp Supersport SV (in Ferrari Grigio Titanium). It didn’t take long to have the switchgear explained because there’s hardly any of it to explain. This, of course, meant that I could set off all the sooner.
Still in the garage, but now sitting low down in the car, gripped reassuringly tight by the four point harness, I pressed the little red starter-button. The engine almost exploded into life with a deep BOOM that resonated round the garage, and then subsided to leave a sound to be described, euphemistically, as ‘lumpy at idle’.
And that was it. I pulled out of the stone driveway, hoping to retain my sense of masculinity by not stalling or bunny-hopping down the road. Masculinity luckily intact, I set off for what would be ten hours of the most varied and enthralling driving I’ve ever experienced.
For the first half hour, though, I was slightly nervous. It was raining and there was mud on the roads. Slippery mud. Slippery greasy mud. I had the canvas hood on and the cabin was more than a little warm. My right arm was soaked from water coming up the sidescreen. The wind had pulled some poppers off the hood where it meets the windscreen after only a couple of miles and I had visions of the whole thing flying off. The thought crossed my mind that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
Nevertheless, my plan was to get to know the car and take it easy from Stamford Bridge to Beverley, where I work, and then drive the 20-odd mile commute from work to my home near Goole. I wanted to compare the experience in the Caterham, like-for-like, with that of my MX-5. Then, to travel to a couple of photograph locations I’d been eyeing up in the previous days, and take out my brother-in-law, who is staunchly in the ‘performance by MORE POWER’ camp and who I was secretly hoping to convert.
Driving those first few miles was an altogether alien experience – the immediacy of the Supersport’s reaction to even the slightest steering and throttle inputs, the volume of the induction and exhaust, the strange and seemingly random mechanical noises coming from unlocateable parts of the car - and I was tense. I realised that I wouldn’t enjoy the day ahead of me if I stayed like that. So I relaxed. I relaxed into the seat and relaxed my hands on the steering wheel. And then something amazing happened: all of a sudden, I found myself receiving feedback about everything that was going on under the wheels, through the seat and through the perfectly sized 260mm Momo steering wheel. Of course, this had been happening all the time; I was just too tense to notice it. The little Caterham turned from scary to my best friend in a matter of seconds.
The steering feedback is plentiful, but isn’t as subtle or nuanced as a modern-day Lotus’s. Strangely though, you don’t need pin-sharp steering feel in this car. The beauty is that you just know, intuitively and exactly, how much grip you have and how the chassis is balanced. Somehow it’s the whole of the vehicle that communicates to you.
On full-attack mode it’s nothing short of brutal. The Rover-sourced motor pulls from low down (say, 1500rpm) but at about 5,000 revs, the engine note hardens considerably. Not just louder, but more intense. The acceleration isn’t quite violent but is still very satisfying. You know that it’s always on tap too, because the gearing is so short. And all with a noise that assaults your eardrums. ‘Brrrraaaaa’-(pause, change gear, breathe)-‘Brrrraaaaa’. It’s not an angry engine note, or thrashy like some 4 cylinder engines can be. More, just, hard-as-nails. At this state of tune, the engine feels both strong and quite happy to rev. Even up between 7000-8000 rpm, it doesn’t feel like you’re wringing its neck. I had heard of K-Series engines being peaky (in Seven application), but this 135bhp version had a broader torque band than I’d imagined. So much so that there’s actually not much point holding your foot in till the needle reaches the red line.
Here lies one of its downsides though. At one point I was cruising at the (unofficial) motorway speed limit in sixth gear, I looked down to read nearly 5,000 revs on the dial. Without earplugs, that noise would soon become very wearing. Luckily, I’d had some ‘attenuating’ earplugs made when I was playing in a band a few years back, and they didn’t half come in handy. I would have no qualms about driving long distances with them in.
There is another sort of pleasure to be had; a gentler side to the Caterham. Selecting sixth at 50mph and leaving it there, I meandered over and down the hills and valleys of East Yorkshire, taking in the villages as I passed through – each one leaving me with a memory of the Seven. At this sort of pace, it’s not that different from the Mazda in ride quality. Yes, you feel all the bumps and undulations of the road, but it’s certainly not harsh or crashy. And when you’re not going all-out, you also have time to soak up the atmosphere and all the sensory messages that come to you just by being in the car.
This car is running with 6-inch tyres all round. I talked to Scott McFie, the owner of V12 BRO, about the choice of tyres, and we both agreed that for a road car, anything wider at the rear would lessen the amount of fun you had. On track, where what matters is maximum grip, wider tyres would be a necessity. But on the road, the goal is not shaving tenths of seconds off your trip; it’s the enjoyment, and the feeling of floating through corners with the rear wheels slipping just adds to the magic.
Skip forward several hours past more rain, sunshine, laughter, raised thumbs, immobiliser antics, motorways and single track lanes… to 6pm. It was now about an hour before I was due to drop the Caterham off with its owners, and I decided to have one last fling. This time I headed north out of Stamford Bridge, to the fairy-tale-pretty village of Buttercrambe, and then beyond (on an unnumbered B-road) to Malton. I stumbled on it by chance, but wow, what a road. By this time the sun had been shining for a while, the sky was blue and the tarmac had completely dried out.
Every once in a while - and there doesn’t seem to be a scientific or repeatable formula for when it happens - everything seems to come together, and you just take a road apart. This was one of those times. With my earplugs in, I could hear both the sound of the engine, charging up through the gears with that ever-insistent note, but also the sound of my own breathing. It was a hypnotic, dream-like experience.
The Caterham seems to enjoy being thrown around. It’s up to anything you can do to it (barring lunacy) and will respond playfully to inputs that would have almost any other car seriously unsettled. I know it’s a cliché but you really do grab it by the scruff of the neck. This car was specced with an optional lightweight flywheel, the effect of which is an increase in engine braking and a corresponding increase in the smoothness with which you string corners together. On some long stretches of twisty road I didn’t need to use the brake at all. Deliberately backing off the throttle on entering a corner, you can feel the balance of the car shift significantly, but because of its light weight, low centre of gravity and wide track (this Supersport also has the widened Superlight suspension upgrade package) there’s none of the usual accompanying body roll, so it’s always working at its optimum and never feels overloaded.
Leaning harder than ever into corners, feeding in the accelerator to its stop on seeing the exit, the rear wheels shimmy before fully straightening up to blast up the next straight, and all the while, the little car working its socks off. This is farming country and fields are being ploughed, so there were dusty patches of dried mud from tractor wheels, and sometimes loose gravel mid corner. In a lot of cars when the back steps out suddenly, you make a kind of reactive ‘flinch’ for opposite lock. With the Caterham, though, it seems to happen in slow motion, predictably, and with no cause for concern. And just as I had found out early in the day, I now realised even more fundamentally at higher speeds that the Seven responds better to a light grip on the steering wheel and when it’s allowed to find its own way through a corner – slip, grip and all.
I could have been driving for ten minutes or two hours - I wouldn’t have known. Time seemed to disappear. Eventually arriving on the outskirts of Stamford Bridge, my fun had come to an end. But that didn’t matter. I’d already witnessed what a sublimely controllable and utterly involving car this 135bhp K-series Caterham is. Brother-in-law safely converted, the single best drive of my life (that last hour) completed, it was time to return V12 BRO to its owners Scott and Lynda, and head home. Oh how I slept that night. I don’t remember my head hitting the pillow.
TW
Thanks Tim
Sadly thebtime came to replaced the little yellow Supersport. We went for a new 125 Roadsport (Sigma). I was a bit sceptical as I loved the supersport but the Sigma has had rave reviews and is enough for a first day out and even for more experienced drivers.
Cheers and see you next year.
Scott (and Lynda)
Sadly thebtime came to replaced the little yellow Supersport. We went for a new 125 Roadsport (Sigma). I was a bit sceptical as I loved the supersport but the Sigma has had rave reviews and is enough for a first day out and even for more experienced drivers.
Cheers and see you next year.
Scott (and Lynda)
Smollet said:
K800 RUM said:
Thanks Tim, I posted it up earlier in chit chat ("Interesting artcle from Piston Heads")
Martin.
Martin you should post the link to BC. Keep it going round in circles Martin.
Noger, I don't know buddy. I'm smitten. But i just can't afford it.
Tim
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