So, I'm building a car.....

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 In July last year, I went to visit a friend as part of a work trip. He'd warned me to pack light because he was picking me up in the Caterham he'd recently finished building.


First impressions - wow this thing was small, he wasn't kidding about packing light. Secondly after a "spirited" 45 minute drive home (direct I think it should have taken about 15 minutes but we may have gone a slightly indirect route), I NEEDED one of these.

 I've always been aware of "Seven" type cars - I used to go to hillclimbs with a girlfriend whose dad and brother raced a Ginetta when I was younger so I had seen plenty of them, and always liked the look, but had never had a ride before. There are a number of manufacturers of them, but Caterham is the industry standard, and if you are picky about these things, the most direct descendant of the original Colin Chapman car. If you have never ridden in one, do so. The best way to think about it is not as a car, but as a practical(ish) 4 wheeled motorbike. I've ridden a motorbike for 20 years and objectively its the fastest way from A to B, but this little car FEELS like you are doing a million miles an hour everywhere, even when you aren't braking the speed limit. I'm not going to go into a description of them, and how they drive - there are loads of reviews on youtube and elsewhere. One of the better ones is Chris Harris of top gear fame.


So I started looking. Caterham have a great configurator here and I started plugging in the sort of spec level I thought I'd like. I ended up with the screen below.


Nearly £40k?! OK - I can't justify that.The idea gets shelved. Fast forward to this year and I'm idly browsing the web and I come across a couple of much more low cost manufacturers. In fact if you look around the world, there are a LOT of companies building similar cars at every step in the budget spectrum. You have manufacturers as far afield as New Zealand (Fraser) and South Africa (Birkin), you have the logical evolution of the car from Dunkervoort in the netherlands (crazy expensive, crazy fast) and then a right old mix of UK based builders from people building the original low cost Haynes roadster in their shed, all the way to caterham themselves. The one that initially caught my eye was MK - who are doing cracking business building Mazda MX5 and various other engined variants from their base in Essex. I had a chat with Neil on the phone - SUPER helpful guy and answered a lot of my questions. I then started getting on the forums online, and 3 companies came to the top of my list. MK themselves, GBS in the midlands, and Raptor - near Edinburgh. (for those wondering where westfield are - the aesthetics of them just don't really work for me for some reason.) 

So which did I end up going for? Well, the blog title kind of gives it away, but I'll go into my decision in the next post.


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