THERE ARE COUNTLESS WAYS IT can hurt you. Absentmindedly hang a finger in one of the steering-wheel spokes, a fender bender might guillotine your knuckles. The steel frame is inches from your body. The bumpers of other cars sit at eye level. It will all come for you in a crash, molesting your arms or face or spleen. Ralph Nader warned us about this crap, half a century ago, and here you are, behind the wheel, totally not listening.

This story originally appeared in the March/April, 2018 issue of R&T - Ed.



And yet. The car weighs 1080 pounds—less than half a Mazda Miata. The flat windshield and ancient aerodynamics throw hurricane winds into your lap. The steering fizzes out a stream of talk—about the tires, the weather, the glossy white lines in the highway. Hit a large bump and the rear wheels find air for what feels like hours.

It’s all so direct and hysterical and pure that you start to think the world has lost its mind, that new cars are bloated, jazzless bargebeasts. You forget about safety, because safety is cousin to worry, and worry is the last thing that a live-axle, 80-hp, 2017 Caterham Seven Sprint wants you to do. The car mostly just screams at you to pay attention. And if you want to get around that, it says, you’re going to have to stop driving and stare at your phone or watch House Hunters drunk or something. But in the meantime, here, feel this pebble we just ran over, and feel it in the seat of your pants.

To facilitate this experience, we drove around Wales for several days, this near-empty chunk of the United Kingdom, where deserted roads flit across mountains. Small car with big personality in a big part of a small country. It rained. The pavement had the grip of greased butter. Somewhere, Nader probably chewed a fingernail or two, but that’s fine, because the rear wheels flew through the air a few times and nobody died and did I mention the whole thing was a stone-cold riot?

Matthew Howell

IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT COLIN CHAPMAN, founder of Lotus Cars, you probably suspect he was a man of details. Lotuses are known for being light and focused, in service of speed and handling purity; this is generally the result of attention to the little things. But Chapman was also known for doing the exact opposite, chasing his next big idea before fleshing out the last one. Like Elon Musk or Christian von Koenigsegg, his mentality seemed custom-built to clash with a hidebound, heavily regulated industry like carmaking.

Perhaps because of this, Chapman’s work and philosophies left a dent in our collective consciousness. Thirty-five years after the man’s death, you can still find his name in sports-car forums, attributed to quotes both apocryphal and real: “Simplify, then add lightness.” “You won’t catch me driving a race car that I have built.” “Any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.” In Lotus’s golden era—generally agreed to be from the early 1960s until Chapman’s fatal heart attack, in late 1982—the company’s road cars were some of the most engaging fast cars in the world. They also had a reputation for being often comically unfinished and fragile as wet Kleenex. Door fit changed with the weather, vital parts shook loose, electrical problems bred like rabbits. Even now, people who buy old Lotuses as weekend cars either drive them for years or sell after a few miles. The compromise can pay huge dividends, but it’s nothing if not an acquired taste.

Like the Lotus Seven. Launched in 1957, the model was an update of a bare-bones car called the Lotus Six, which was itself little more than a Fifties formula car with a passenger seat and a muffler. The Seven’s genius lay in a combination of smart tuning (suspension giving both soft ride and batty amounts of grip) and a tiny footprint, plus cleverly packaged, low-cost components (running gear borrowed from common British sedans). Paired with elegant weight-saving touches, like a front anti-roll bar that doubled as an upper suspension link, the result was light enough, even with less than 100 hp, to blow most contemporary sports cars into the weeds.

Matthew Howell

In 1973, Chapman sold Seven construction rights to a small Lotus dealership in the town of Caterham, near London. Caterham Cars still makes the Seven. It still uses a Chapman supplier, Arch Motors, to build frames. The U.K.’s lax regulations for low-production vehicles allow new Sevens to be basically old. The car has no airbags, sound deadening, or purpose-built crash structure. Some models don’t even come with carpet or a heater, like the original. Even in the 1960s, when sports cars were viewed as stylish hair shirts, Seven ownership was a sacrifice akin to wearing a kilt without underwear: Some people get it, others think you should probably stop doing so many fun drugs.

The model we chose for this test was built to remind people of those years. The 2017 Seven Sprint was designed for the Seven’s 60th anniversary. It pairs vintagey green paint with period drag unavailable on other Caterhams (old-look Smiths gauges, a polished transmission tunnel), plus a 660-cc, turbocharged, fuel-injected Suzuki three-cylinder; 14-by-4.5-inch Toyota steel wheels; and a Suzuki-sourced live axle and five-speed manual. The result looks neither new nor old, just cheeky, with a bright-eyed, slightly empty face, like one of those dogs that fancy women carry in their purses.

Predictably, the 60 Sprints built were sold in short order. If you live in Europe, you can buy the mechanically similar Caterham Seven 160, with modern trim, for £17,495 (about $24,200). Either way, you get a body made of aluminum sheet, fiberglass fenders, and a tubular-steel space frame. As with all Caterhams, details like frame stiffness, top, windows, and heater efficiency have improved since the 1970s—significant changes that actually aid usability, though they won’t keep a Mazda Miata up at night. Americans can buy a Seven like the 160 in America, just not with that Suzuki three, which is not legally importable.

Matthew Howell

Still, this is not a normal car. It’s also not cheap in any form, and none of this helps people step up to the plate. Caterham sold more than 600 Sevens globally in 2017; Mazda sold more Miatas in America in July of last year alone. But that’s the funny bit—like most icons, the Seven is most successful as an idea. Like a Morgan or an Ariel Atom, Sevens have long generated copies and crowds at car shows, because they suggest the gut feelings that put humans on wheels in the first place. Plus why car enthusiasts tend to fetishize the past—when the automobile as a whole was more awed, but less of a filter between you and the road.

We took the Sprint to Wales because Wales is special. While American car magazines and engineers have places like California’s Angeles Crest, the Brits have the counties north of Cardiff, where the pavement is a gift from God. The asphalt drapes over vast expanses of nothing, dipping into villages and ribboning into hills shotgunned full of corners. Every five minutes or so, you crest a ridge and can see clear to the horizon. The land looks like someone ran California and Led Zeppelin through a blender, then added a few million truckloads of sheep. Traffic is microscopic, largely due to perpetual rain and distance from any major city save Cardiff. Which is only major in the sense that sheep there do not wander through intersections and harass you at stop signs, as they do in the rest of the country.

The car was the capper. I picked it up from Caterham’s delivery facility near Gatwick, outside London, then immediately hauled 200 miles west, to Wales. Like all Sevens, the Sprint offers laserlike steering, screamingly high in resolution. Even on smooth roads, the wheel bounces and flits, shouting out everything it touches. You move it by thinking rude thoughts at your fingertips. Your eyes keep dropping to the long fenders, two chrome headlight bowls in the seam where they meet the hood. The exhaust exits maybe a foot beneath your right elbow. You can reach past the windshield and grope the hood or the wipers.

Matthew Howell

It can occasionally feel like goofy overload, which is kind of the point. Everyone always talks about how a Seven’s cockpit is so low you can touch the pavement, but no one ever mentions how it lets you lean into the breeze while driving, body half out the car. On my first day in the Seven, I spent so long like that, yelling nonsense into the wind like a dinkus, that my shirt grew spattered with road grime. I only stopped when it began to rain.

That was shortly after I got to Cardiff. At which point the rain carried on for a full day. Wales grew slick and shiny and pretty much demanded the Caterham’s top. It is Rube Goldbergian, with tension straps and snaps and fabric doors, like an old Jeep. When the top is down, you literally jump behind the wheel. The move takes seconds and recalls an alternate universe where the British wrote and produced The Dukes of Hazzard while blitzed on scotch. The giddy fun of doing this is inversely proportional to the non-fun of shoving yourself into a Seven with the top up. When the Caterham’s weather kit is fully assembled, you can’t adjust the door mirrors without leaving the car. Getting in or out requires perverse body origami. You dive in or out of the door hole head first, worm-wrestling your legs through after, never the same way twice.

It sounds crazy, but the process is addictive. Like that three-cylinder—torquey, mostly midrange, a little vibratey at low rpm, a smidge of turbo lag. It’s a tooty little calliope of exhaust grunts and wastegate whistles. There is so little power that you have to beat the whee out of the car to get anywhere; it is entirely possible to be outrun by delivery vans. In the grand tradition of tiny engines, full throttle occasionally does a remarkable impression of half throttle. The car begs you to jam the pedal into the firewall anyway.

Matthew Howell

Weirdly, the whole thing jibes—the Sprint’s goodness complements everything else about it. That Suzuki five-speed is the only bit not to scale: The linkage makes each shift throw heavy, half clunk into gear, half forced entry. You forgive the car this, because its tiny tires and pillow-soft springs offer months of warning before the car even hints at a slide. The suspension feels like an automotive charm bracelet, twinkly and endearing. It doesn’t so much move with the road as port you from place to place in the lane, in little roly-poly fits and jabs.

But that’s all Sevens. They sponge up effort and demand it, whether loafing in traffic or spazzing down a back road. The contradiction is somehow great and awful at once. And the car sands down sanity and makes every inch of your body sore, but it feels great, like you’re sacrificing one valuable mental state for another. After a long day at the wheel, you climb out of a Seven with a vague hint of misery, simultaneously wanting to never see the car again and also desperate to fall back behind the wheel.

Of course, this isn’t new stuff. All Sevens are like this, and have been like this for decades, because the model hasn’t fundamentally changed since Chapman was around. Which can bring funky little intersections of nostalgia and modern eye-rolling. The top is not the only bit of Sixties-feel weirdness that would be unacceptable in a modern car: The passenger wiper arm went MIA the first time I used it, leaping into the darkness in a blinding storm near Cardiff. The doors occasionally hosed rainwater into the cockpit, because their body gaps are thick enough to jam fingers through and basically made watertight by hope. The two tiny heater vents will warm your upper legs or ankles, but not both. Halfway through the trip, a snap broke off the top fabric, flinging the right door open. (I stopped at a gas station, bought some duct tape, and taped it shut. It leaked less air than before the snap broke.) The engine started hard after a coffee stop on the last night. And the car refused to idle consistently at full alternator load—lights on, heater running, wipers. Which would have been useful, but then, maybe it never got dark and cold and rainy in Sixties England and I’m just being unfair?

Matthew Howell

These issues were trivial; we’ve seen far worse from other low-production cars, and none of the problems slowed the trip. (Nor were they unexpected, really. I owned a 2003 Seven Super Sprint several years ago, and my car was just as fiddly.)

Still, the Sprint’s foibles reminded me that new-car buyers once tolerated a lot more than they do now. Just as we wonder how our grandparents put up with nonexistent rustproofing and iffy reliability, I couldn’t help wondering if people won’t look back on modern cars, long after I’m dead, and feel similarly about personal responsibility. If the silly, impractical, relatively dangerous human-driven Caterham—or any current car—will somehow seem like a signpost from the dumb ages. When we were foolish enough to risk our lives for the sake of travel.

For a person who likes both progress and adventure, that last bit can be hard to parse. It seems equal parts plausible future and terrifyingly boring. We live in a time of unprecedented speed and power from even the most mundane new cars, but also a dwindling connection between driver and machine. New cars have grown heavier, more complex, and less engaging, their engineers seeking to eliminate the drawbacks of the average commute. Compared with 20 years ago, even sports cars are generally heavier and more distant. Performance has become less a metric for a company’s engineering skill than a solved-for commodity, reliable and friendly.

Matthew Howell

Are we better off now than half a century ago? Of course. Highways are safer, and new cars are faster and more efficient. But we’ve undeniably lost a few of the intangibles. Speed limits aren’t going up, and roads aren’t getting less crowded. And chiefly, the automated highway is on the horizon. It can seem frightening, and it will eventually change everything in ways that cannot be predicted—especially how we interact with fun cars.

All of which only makes the Caterham’s lessons seem increasingly relevant: A live-wire slow car is better than a dull fast one. It’s better to drive to 60 mph in seven seconds than ride there in three. And if the sensory package doesn’t carve memories, speed gets old pretty quickly.

I don’t know what the future holds for us, as drivers. But I know that those qualities are perpetually worth chasing, because they make you notice your own pulse.

Matthew Howell

At the end of the last day in Wales, long after the sun had set, I drove to a hotel in Gatwick. The car was set to go back to Caterham in the morning, and my body was wrung. As I lay in bed, muscles aching after three days of nonstop mileage, my brain felt itchy. The car consumed my thoughts. I wanted it in every part of my life, until they put me in the dirt.

After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, I stood up and walked outside. I folded myself into the Sprint one more time and let the engine warm. Then I lowered the top and tore laps around the block, in rain and 40-degree air, soaked to the bone. There may have been roundabouts.

I parked the car, went back to my room, dried off, and climbed into bed again. My feet were the same temperature as the rest of my legs for the first time all day. It felt good. Not as good as being cold and wet and miserable at the top of third gear, but good nonetheless.