Price £27,790
MPG 30
Top speed 122mph
Before climbing into a Caterham, there are some things you need to be honest with yourself about. Are you slim? Over 13st and you’ve no chance of wedging your love handles into its narrow seats. Do you find intimacy awkward? Those seats are so close together your personal space setting needs to be set at “honeymoon”. The chairs have no padding whatsoever, but are unexpectedly comfortable in the same way a roller coaster’s buttock-moulded units are. They’re bucket seats that are more bucket than seat. Do you perspire? Back sweat is an issue. Can you do at least one dip on the parallel bars? There are no doors and no roof and good shoulder strength is the best way to heave yourself in and out. Wide feet? The pedals are so close together I had to take my trainers off and drive barefoot to avoid stomping on more than one at a time. Low self-esteem? Driving a Caterham is like spending time with a bucking bronco hell bent on exposing just how poor a rider you are. Every missed gear, every misjudged line is cruelly exposed. I haven’t bunny-hopped so much since my daughter’s fifth birthday party. Theme: bunnies and hopping.
So, I’m in and the engine is ticking over, by which I mean it’s coughing like a phlegmy asthmatic with rage issues. I’m restrained, Houdini style, by a four-point seatbelt; the tiny steering wheel is at arms’ length. Staring through the laughable windscreen the vented bonnet stretches into the horizon. You sit so low you could put your hand on the pavement, though you’d probably burn the skin off your wrist on the giant, throbbing exhaust pipe.
This is the 270, it’s one of three new cars released this year. This one is the easy one: the runt of the litter. There is also a 360 and a 420. When I say “new”, that’s not strictly accurate as nothing is really new at Caterham. All are descendants of the Lotus Seven built in 1957 by Colin Chapman. There have been many revisions and tweaks over the past half-century, but the DNA of the car is still unmistakable. If Colin was to come back to life, he’d feel instantly at home in one of these cars.
The 270 packs a 135bhp, 1.6-litre Ford “Sigma” engine, similar to one you’d find in a Focus. Only this one has been toughened up at a hellish brute camp and now has a real sense of mission. It takes no prisoners. Turn the ignition and it grunts and sputters, whines and shudders. Press the throttle and the avalanche of power means the drive is heart-stoppingly electric. That combination of swagged-up engine and flimsy, cigar-tube body – it weighs just 540kg – makes for a rocket ride. It’s scarcely believable that this is the least extreme of Caterham’s line-up. It will hit 62mph in just 5 seconds and tops out at 122mph. And at anything over 50mph you feel like you are about to have lift-off.
The Caterham offers nothing in the way of creature comforts: no stereo, no power steering, no aircon, no air bags… no nothing. But crouching at the kerb it is stunning to look at. It sounds incredible and it delivers a raw, automotive high. If you can handle it, you’ll find an hour at the wheel as life affirming as wearing a pair of cardiac chest paddles under your shirt.
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter@MartinLove166
