Caterham Seven 360S - Unleashing the Almost Forgotten Memory of Joy

[Vovchandr]

 

https://driven.site/words/caterham-seven-360s

 

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t's a bit silly, and that's okay.

The 360S doesn't bother with proper doors because doors aren't on the 'Hauling ass' checklist. And I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been tensing my face. Rewatching footage of me driving revealed a horrifying grimace of concentration. Imagine a man bench pressing twice his weight, whilst also trying to remember what day of the week he had promised to visit his nan - and you've got the vision pretty spot on.

Hammering the Caterham down a driving road is absolute bliss. It's flow-state for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The two-litre engine hauls you up towards the rev limiter with a unique sense of purpose rarely felt in other cars. The way it builds speed is so direct and engaging that the sense of acceleration escapes you. It sounds counterintuitive, but you're not thrown back in your seat or slapped in the face with a hunk of speed; instead, you inhabit the speed itself. It's an alien experience. Alien, that's a great way of putting it. It's completely otherworldly, or prehistoric, if we're keeping the metaphors on earth. But it's also surprisingly very forgiving. At no point in the 750 miles I spent with the Caterham did it ever do a single thing I didn't ask it to. And on the odd occasion when the backend stepped a little further than I wanted, it was so easy to predict that I really started to trust the car; you very much feel like you're on the same page. No matter how furious the driving can get, it always has a hand on your shoulder.

Maybe that's all down to the S designation, which I reckon stands for 'Sensible'. Compared to its R counterpart, the S comes with slightly softer suspension, standard three-point seatbelts, and a less intrusive rollcage, among other things. Outside of some heavy lifting' track work', this would be the one to have. Although I do find myself pondering the slightly more powerful 420S, which I imagine is the truly perfect amount of power for this ABS and Traction Control-less velociraptor of a car. Any more power would be batshit, and yet that exists too—there is a 620R version, one of which sat in the corner of the Caterham factory, taunting me throughout my tour of the factory. Finished in Lamborghini pink, it's quite the brute.