CHANNELING CHAPMAN: Caterham R500

Nothing’s missing if it doesn’t need to be there in the first place. It may be a subtle shift from former Lotus boss Colin Chapman’s take on “Simplify, and add lightness,” but a good place to start with Caterham’s coffin with four wheels is this: You don’t miss it if you don’t need it.

What radio? The wind at 60 mph throbs a satisfying bass note into your eardrum. What touchscreen navigation? The road you’re on is six inches under your back pocket. You remember the street name when you’re nearly sledding across it. Heck, you might even want to name the individual stones as they sweep underneath. Air conditioning is unnecessary, too. Mother Nature does just fine. And sunny days are a prerequisite in the Caterham. You need to see everything around you in a Caterham. Not only because crisp, Colorado mountain days are too beautiful to impose an annoying quarter-inch window between you and the Front Range, but also because at just over 1,000 pounds, even unassuming sedans turn into 2-ton missiles.

These are 53-year-old cars that wear their age well. Not that the chassis on this specimen, a shocking-yellow-and-black bumblebee Caterham R500, was stamped in the 1950s. Rather, the model here is days, weeks or, at best, only months old. The metal and chassis were constructed in Surrey, England, and are brand new. There are parts sculpted by the cold, calculating precision of computer-aided machinery. There are others, such as the long hood held in place by spring fasteners not uncommon to gardening tools, which bear the marks of craftsmen who sculpt aluminum with hands and decades of practice. For that reason, fewer than 600 Caterhams are sold each year. The pieces for each car are loaded into wood boxes, lifted into metal shipping containers, and lugged all the way across the Atlantic on a ship that makes harbor in Houston. That passage is almost certainly the same as it was in 1957, when Chapman started the company.

Then Jon Nelson gets his hands on it. The bright, jolly, middle-aged river scientist is a bit of a fanatic when it comes to purpose-built machines. He has 13 cars now — maybe more; he wipes his brow and counts cars like grandparents count grandchildren — and they all share a common trait.

“It’s only parts,” he says over and over.

Those three words drive Nelson’s view on cars. If they’re only parts, then each should serve its purpose; no more, no less. If it doesn’t do that, then why would you need it? Used to be, he says, Ferraris were Italian parts put together to build street cars that could go fast. Now they’re sculpted machines that cost exorbitant amounts of money. He owned a few old Ferraris. No interest in owning new ones, and if he could afford to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new one, he certainly doesn’t carry himself that way. He has a 1957 Alfa Romeo in the garage that he’s looking to get started on. New-Ferrari owners don’t have oil under their nails like he does.

This Caterham R500 was once just parts. A few months ago it arrived, in pieces, at Jon’s shop where he and three other part-timers started bolting, wrenching and twisting it into its elongated shape. Caterham builds cars like Betty Crocker bakes cakes. For your tens of thousands of dollars (not hundreds of thousands), Caterham sends you a kit with every part you need, sans engine and transmission. The two main ingredients that make these mosquito cars move are the same ingredients that help Caterhams dodge a few key rules that cost millions for major automakers. Without an engine, there’s no need to adhere to hundreds of different safety regulations. For example, Hondas need to meet safety regulations that would save a Faberge egg. That costs millions in research and development and thousands spent packing sacks into your steering wheel and dash. Caterhams get none of those parts. That saves money and weight. But these cars are street legal just the same.

It takes Kia 597 pages to teach you how to operate a Sportage. It takes Caterham 220 to teach you how to put their entire car together. It’s not for lack of detail either. The manual, with a plain green cover and printed in exactly two typefaces, is incredibly detailed — the car is just beautifully simple. The 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine within this R500, purchased from a nearby Ford dealership, is close to the same one found in a Ford Focus. The manual transmission is nearly identical, too. Caterham can’t require a certain engine be installed in its cars, which is why everything including V8s can be found jammed underneath the long skinny hood, but the small Ford Duratec engine does fit really, really well in there. Wink, wink. For $3,000 to $5,000  over the cost of the kit, engine and transmission price, which can run from $30,000 to $60,000, Jon will assemble a Caterham for customers. He’s putting together this R500 for a client who lives in New Jersey. About half of new Caterham buyers opt for the “factory-built” cars from Jon.

“I would hope that more people put them together themselves,” he said. “I like that because then these become a part of you.”

He’s the only builder listed by Caterham in the United States, and his shop in Arvada looks the part. He gets shipments in six-week waves or so, and the number of orders pick up in the summer. There’s usually a six-month wait for cars from England, and added time waiting for any parts that didn’t make the boxes the first time around. That happens; you’re getting parts and kits that have been handpicked, not from the rubric of a multi-billion, multi-national computer, somewhere in the automotive ether. Caterham, a company with ties to multi-billion dollar F1 racing and a worldwide carmaker-but-not-really-manufacturer, has only about 40 employees at its headquarters in Surrey. In fact, that “factory” is a lot like Jon’s shop: lots of parts in places around the garage and hand tools everywhere.

And for the effort of a few wrenches, hammers and binders, there’s a lot of return. This R500 slingshots down the road to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds. A Bugatti Veyron, which costs $1.4 million, does that run in roughly the same amount of time. From 0-100 mph, this car, which costs about 1/30th of the Veyron, is a little faster. It really only takes 540,000 seconds to assemble the car, Jon estimates. (That’s 150 hours if you prefer.) Some Caterhams, which look next-to-nothing different than this R500, take 40 hours to build.

Jon starts with front suspension. Then he installs the drivetrain components and rear suspension. That’s followed by the rear fenders, prep the engine and transmission — that drops in shortly thereafter — hook everything up (oh, they’ll start the engine, just to make sure that works, too), tie wires down, interior (it’s really just two bucket seats and a steering wheel), weather equipment, front fenders, then front lights. That’s it. That’s how you make a car. No, that’s really it. If Jon builds the car for you, he’ll save the final part just for you — clipping in the Caterham badges.

“They have to do something to help build these cars, I guess.”

After all, they’re just parts. And the Caterham badge is the only part that doesn’t explicitly help the Caterham’s locomotion. The Caterham’s brakes, which are normal-sized rotors, are like boat anchors on the 13-inch wheels. The impossible acceleration means it’s possible to crawl under the car in front of you in seconds. The face-ripping deceleration means cars behind you can’t stop to avoid crawling into your passenger seat, too.

“I tell buyers to watch ahead and look behind. There’s nothing else you can really do,” Jon says.

That’s not to say there’s inherent danger involved in driving a Caterham — far from it. The ability to corner faster than the stock market gives the car next-to-ultimate control. That’s a connection very few cars with four wheels can boast. The speed of any Caterham is intoxicating purely because it’s the only way to connect with the road without eating it.

That’s Caterham’s appeal. The most direct connection to driving is perhaps the fewest moving parts between you and speed. n