The Lotus Seven, now known as the Caterham 7, is one of the most iconic British vehicles of all time, the little bug-eye headlights, open front wheels and tiny cockpit have been delivering driving thrills since it was first rolled out of the Lotus factory by Colin Chapman in 1957. Chapman’s desire had been to build a motor car that could be driven to the race track, raced hard all day, then driven home once all on-track rivals had been soundly trounced – He can’t possibly have known just how successful his design would go on to become.
In 1972 Lotus announced that they would be discontinuing the Seven in order to focus on their newer offerings, this led to Graham Nearn (founder of Caterham Cars, the largest Lotus dealer in Britain) offering to buy the tooling for the Seven so that production could continue unabated. Fortunately, Chapman agreed and the model has now been in continuous production for 57 years and counting.
Over that 57 year lifespan, many have taken a swing at redesigning the Seven, the team at Caterham have very carefully updated the looks and performance in an incremental fashion so as not to upset the anoraks and most would agree that Caterham have been staggeringly successful as caretakers of the model.
