CATERHAM SEVEN 170
MATT PRIOR Whisper it, but the Caterham Seven 170, my favourite car of this year, actually isn’t my favourite Caterham to drive. But I’ve decided that doesn’t matter.
When Caterham set out to revive its cheapest and least powerful model, fitted with a small threecylinder turbocharged Suzuki engine, it decided to do something special with it. It decided to make the lightest Seven it has ever produced. And that is the kind of idea that I can get behind every day of the week.
Specifying the engine and the fivespeed gearbox that all Caterhams drive through these days was presumably the easy bit. It’s the rest where the firm had to be brutal, either designing the lightest-possible version of something – fashioning the rear wings, narrower than other Caterham wings, out of carbonfibre – or not fitting parts at all.
There are two versions of the 170, the R and the S. With the S, you get a windscreen, a heater, the full weather gear and suchlike, plus carpets and some plush seats. In the R, you don’t (although Caterham’s options list means you can put comfort equipment back in).
In its lightest-possible form, the 170R weighs no more than 440kg.
I didn’t find it an instant hit. I liked it when I drove it around Sussex and Kent, but its appeal didn’t truly come alive until I tested it at Trac Môn and on the surrounding Welsh roads.
You can’t drive very quickly on any road these days, so it’s important that a car is a lot of fun at sensible speeds. Weighing nothing, with unassisted controls and being exceptionally narrow, the 170 would do that even if it didn’t handle superbly. But it does.
Autocar was banging on about the advantage of narrow cars as long ago as the 1970s. At 1.47m wide, the 170 isn’t just narrow by general standards, it’s even 105mm narrower than any other Seven.
And then there’s the 170 on track. This isn’t a car whose power will get you into – or out of – difficult situations. But it’s one whose chassis will let you throw it at a corner with wild abandon, whereupon it will drift like some kind of historic race car while actually retaining surprisingly high cornering speeds. It’s possible that, even though it wears 155-section tyres, it has too much grip.
To be honest, I like my Caterhams with a little more power than this. But in chasing purity of lightness, the 170 occupies a particularly special place in modern motoring – and therefore also in my heart.