Outbound

Hes a part of yawspeed up here in North chicago with another experienced racer (jason, won the 2007 mx5 cup championship), they have a small shop running from the headquarters of gridlife. https://yawspeed.us/ not sure if he’s publicly out about doing Emerald stuff, but Dave is the one who put me in touch, telling me he was the expert here stateside. Will find out in a few weeks how it goes. i ended up doing all the nitron stuff from Jack Webb on my own, but going to let aric get it dialed in. Got those new gauges in as well, next up is still to get the custom pedals designed and made. However i have a new stable mate coming. A 1970 mini cooper track car in the same shade of orange.

I just dropped the car off with Aric Streeter a few days ago to get all the engine stuff done. Sounds like he’s got experience with those DVA maps. In a small world, his shop is only a mile away from my house!

I have a laundry list of things to do for my Superlight R - new Emerald ECU to improve that 1.8 VHPD engine from Dave Andrews - pulleys associated with it. - jack webb road tuned Nitrons - the various bits and bobs to get the bumpsteer and alignment under control. - new gauges and switching to a gps speedo. - machine some nice pedals after some reverse engineering. Have a new Haas VF2SS being installed at my warehouse, and intend to do a few fun projects. - replace the radiator that seems to have a small leak. - whatever else to get it ready for a few track days next year, and just to be able to idle in traffic fine.

They are the OEM units, only difference is that doesn’t have the caterham logo silk screened on the lower lens. Unless you mean buying direct from them? You’ll likely need to buy at minimum 10-20 units as companies like that don’t sell retail.

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/upd-31267 Can get them here. Wildly better over OEM.

To fill this thread up with my rambles, here is what I posted regarding the Caterham OEM lights: You can get these NS-Siruis lights from Summit Racing: https://www.summitracing.com/parts/upd-31267 I have been running around for a few weeks with them on, and have been pleasantly impressed. The beam pattern doesn't look promising on the wall, but on-road performance is good enough. If I wanted outright performance and beam pattern I would go with the Morimoto listed above. I just wanted the modern OEM look, so went the NS-Sirus (united pacific) route. I got headlight lowering brackets, new bowls, and got it all wired in along with the Caterham rear LED kit. I am quite happy with the lighting. Now just sorting out drivablity and oil leaks.

This car would do EXTREMELY well on Bring A Trailer. I’d highly suggest putting it up for sale on there and have a professional take all the photos and videos for you. Well worth the time and little bit extra money.

They are rebranded lights manufactured by Sirius (http://www.ns-sirius.com/products.php?page=9&plevel=2&pmid1=1&pmid2=4&pmid3=&keyword=) but when I fired them up on my power supply they looked like they have a plenty solid beam pattern. I have a friend who is the optical engineer for Morimoto lighting, and he's shown me all the optical data on these 5.75" headlights he designed and it looks amazing. https://www.morimotohid.com/housing-morimoto-sealed6-led-5-7-5?quantity=1 However, I wanted the OEM look. If I am not thrilled with these oem ones, I might spring for the Moriomoto. Or I'll get them anyways and do a back to back. Ultimately I don't plan on driving the car too much at night (it'll be put away for the winter) so ultimate lighting performance wasn't high on my list. A clean OEM look was the ideal one, and there are a lotttttt of bad looking 5.75" options out there. As far as 5.75" vs 7". If sticking with halogen bulbs, then yea the larger the lamp the better. However with LED it doesn't really matter much. Ultimately could even have a tiny 2-3" headlight with a proper projector and it'd outperform a 7" halogen. Just would look very odd on these cars. 5.75" I think modernizes the look and makes it look lower and wider, so that's why I went down that path.

It was indeed a fun adventure, the kind we don’t get to do so much anymore since we both have growing families of our own, and our own thriving businesses now. Was great to unplug and just focus on the adventure of driving for a few days. He did make it home with zero issues once we found the signal wire itself was having flaky contact. I did some work on the car today, redid the vacuum lines with new 4mm ID tubing and tees, now the car idles a lot smoother and can leave a light without having to rev a bunch, or buck at low RPMs. There was clearly some small leaks in there.

I actually am a lighting engineer. I designed the SL2 headlight bulbs that Diode Dynamics makes almost 10 years ago. Those headlight bulbs aren't the worst, but nothing beats a properly designed headlight with an LED source from the start. I ended up finding the OEM Caterham LED units (sold under United Pacific from Summit Racing for the LHD models) and got those before the car even arrived. Also have the new LED Rear light kit. Given my company (www.outboundlighting.com) designs LED lights, it's an important part to me. Fits in the tightest spots in my warehouse too! Haha.

Unfortunately no roller barrels. Just a 1.8 VHPD motor. Still 190hp and a screamer. I just posted up a little recap of my trip. Was a blast, and now getting the car all setup how I would like it. I'll likely post a build thread soon.

Well, it's done. And it was as much as an adventure as we hoped. Got the notice that the cars were ready, and booked a one-way flight to Baltimore, meeting up with my buddy Zach. We spent the afternoon getting some crab cakes from Duda's, and watching an Orioles game. Shockingly baseball games are more enjoyable when you can just sit back and chat verses having to wrangle kids. Used the lime scooters to jet around the harbor. Next morning got to the Port at 8am to meet our escort who would take us into the port, get through all the paperwork, move us between a few buildings, and ultimately find our cars in the lot. Though honestly was quite hard to miss! Surprisingly both cars fired up, and we got situated, figured out what controls did what, and then followed our escort out of the port. Mine (in orange) was sputtering and not idling too well, but figured we'd get it sorted. Left the port and headed to the closest gas station, as my guage was showing beyond E. Pulling into the station it was sputtering and barely idling. Great. This is going to be a good start if the car can barely idle.... Filled up with gas and put in 9.5 gallons. We both concluded that this must have a 10-gallon tank since it was showing so close to empty. I later looked up the tank size, its 36L which translates to 9.51 gallons..... Thankfully this gas station was only 1.5 miles away! But then the car wouldn't start. Okay, easy push start and we decided to head to Autozone to get some supplies and check the battery. Found a harbor freight next to it, bought a cheap tool set and tweaked some things like the pedals and checking various coolant lines, electrical, and fastener checks where we could. The battery looked nearly brand new, and tested okay, just low voltage. So we figured maybe had some vampire current from sitting on the boat, and just not enough to start it a few times without giving the alternator time to charge it up. No biggie, we'll hit the road, and we'll pop start if need to. We slogged through baltimore traffic, as we wanted to avoid the interstate while getting used to these things. Took an hour to get through and out of the city, in pretty hot weather, starting to regret this idea of driving all the way to chicago if it sucks this much, but no matter. A few short blasts through some nice suburban homes gets us excited that this will be great. We finally made it out into the backroads of Maryland and into PA where started getting glimpses of how fun this is. Sweeping country roads, empty traffic, and the intake trumpeting from the front. We kept moving west and made a sobering stop at the United 93 National Memorial. Got some food at a local restaurant nearby and decided to push to south of Pittsburgh to stop for the night. The last 30 minutes of our drive was on an amazing back road filled with tight corners, except.... it was dark, and my headlights were both pointing to the left. Made for wonderful left hand turns, and slow, sketchy right-hand turns. Ha. But made it to the hotel and got a solid nights sleep. The next day we set off, intent to head to Toledo where we'd split off and head our separate ways (onto Detroit and Chicago). Somewhere in Ohio I did a pull from a highway stop light up to 70-80mph and felt the car drop a cylinder. Oh boy.... here we go. Could hardly hold at 60mph and made it to the first exit, and pulled off on a small road. Pulled off the hood expecting the worst. Only to thankfully find that a spark plug boot wire had popped off the distributor cap. Weird, but an easy fix. Double checked all the other boot connections and then fired up. Only to find that now Zach's car wasn't starting. No click of the solenoid, so checked all that wiring, seemed okay. Okay let's roll the car back and push start you this time. Then for some reason when he cranked it fired up, no problem. Odd. Oh well. We made our way a little more south, avoiding a large storm system brewing near the lake. Only got spit on a bit while blasting down the farm field highways of Ohio. Finally made it to Toledo, got some lunch, got preached to by a man at a Mcdonalds gas station, one guy almost blocked us in while trying to leave, saying "I saw this from across the street, I've never seen a Caterham in my life, let alone TWO of them! Can I get a pic?". The usual gas station conversations ensue and then Zach and I split our ways. His car wouldn't start again, but this time we found the solenoid signal wire had completed back off, so plugged that back in firmly, and fired right up. At this point, I just wanted to get home. So I hit the interstate and mostly cruised at 70mph while having to jump out of the car at every toll booth (forgot my EZ Pass of course). Would pull up to the booth with my belts unbuckled, quickly pull off the steering wheel, jump out, grab a ticket or pay the toll, jump back in, pull forward and then off to the side to take my time getting belted up, take a drink of water, and get settled. Hit Chicago right at 5pm on a Friday night, slogged through traffic on Lakeshore Drive. One highlight was that I was in bumper to bumper traffic right next to Solider Field, and I hear some planes coming. I look up and two F-18's flying in formation fly a few hundred feet over my head, practicing for their Sunday afternoon football flyover. Something special when in a car like the Caterham. Couldn't get the grin off my face. Finally made it home to my condo. With my 6 year old daughter losing her mind. Tippy tap toes so excited to jump in, couldn't even wait for me to pull into the garage before she was trying to climb inside. Mission accomplished. All in all, heck of an adventure, glad I had a great friend to do it with, and love how simple these cars are that can go 800 miles with easily solvable niggles without fully disabling the cars. Would I do it again? Probably not. But so so glad I did.

Those prices are what drove me to import my own car as well. So far the total cost has been around $3k to import a $27k car. And hasn't even been that much work either! Fill out 4-5 documents that took a few minutes and a few emails. Been a lot of fun actually, and feel like going to end up with a much better value car than what I could find here currently. Fly to the port on Wednesday to drive home.

How does the revs feel with the lightened flywheel vs the original?

Cars getting loaded on the boat. Only a few more weeks. Mine in orange, and my buddy is getting the blue one.