Unfinished business: Revisiting the Caterham Seven

It couldn’t just be any old Caterham, though. It had to be one that would finish the business that had been put so violently on hold at Goodwood all those years ago. Which meant just one thing: it needed a Crossflow engine.

To a certain sort of (probably older) enthusiast, the word ‘Crossflow’ produces sighs of delight, to others blank expressions. So at the risk of boring the former to inform the latter, the Crossflow was a version of Ford’s old Kent engine where the mixture was breathed in one side and then spat out of the other. You would have thought that was always an obvious way to do it, but apparently not.

Lotus started using the Kent in the Seven 60 years ago, when it was a 1.0-litre engine with 39bhp. After Caterham bought the rights to the car in 1973, it soon tuned the now crossflowed and 1.6-litre motor up to 110bhp for the Seven Sprint and then in 1985 introduced a version bored out to 1.7 litres with big valves, a hot camshaft and 135bhp to create the Super Sprint. Which is what I crashed at Goodwood. So I had to have that engine again.

The problem was that I didn’t want the rest of the car because there was so much about it that would today stop me enjoying it. The front suspension followed Colin Chapman’s old philosophy of using the anti-roll bar as the second half of the upper wishbone, which worked ever less well as ever more lateral forces were put through it. It also had a bone-jarring live rear axle, the standard short cockpit and a four-speed gearbox. What I really wanted was a modern Caterham with proper double wishbones at one end, a De Dion tube at the other, the S3 long cockpit and a five-speed ’box. I wasn’t sure that such a thing even existed.

But it did. I found it at Brands Hatch with Sevens & Classics, the business founded by ex-Caterham sales boss Andy Noble, who I’ve known for decades. It couldn’t have been more suited to my wishes: a 1997 car with the right chassis, suspension and gearbox, a polished aluminium and dark green body and, heaven be praised, not only a Crossflow but a newly rebuilt one.

I didn’t even know that Caterham had been still using the engine that recently; mine must have been one of the last Crossflow Sevens ever made. ❝ It has extraordinary throttle response, a wide but increasingly urgent powerband and a fabulous howl at the top end ❞ And it’s perfect. It handles like a new Caterham, it’s comfortable, it’s cosy with the roof up and heater on, it feels completely solid and, to me, it looks prettier than the modern cars, with their smaller headlights mounted farther forward on the nose.

Really, though, it’s all about the Crossflow. This is as blue-collar a motor as ever graced a Caterham engine bay, a lump of pushrodoperated Ford ironmongery, but my goodness does it have character. You have to tempt it to life on a cold day. You can hear it snuffling and coughing as you coax it from its slumbers with squirts of neat fuel into the big Webers. Then it catches and settles with a growl that couldn’t come from anything else. It has extraordinary throttle response, a wide but increasingly urgent powerband, a fabulous howl at the top end and all the pops and bangs that you could hope for on the overrun. And it’s light: that engine may be iron, but without a heavy twin-cam 16-valve head, it helps the Super Sprint to a 530kg kerb weight.