GRR Garage: Caterham 310S – getting philosophical already

It’s not often you find a car that makes you grin when you’re just nipping down the shops for lunch, especially when looking for a car built within the last few years.

Car manufacturers are spending more and more time trying to engineer technology into cars to make them the perfect drive, to remove any issues, keep the driver comfortable and safe while allowing them to explore the limits of their personal talent. The need to benchmark your latest car against a Nürburgring lap time, or a 0-62 time or an outrageous power figure has perhaps removed an amount of purity from the experience that’s passed on to us, the driver.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with pushing the boundaries of human and mechanical ability, it’s what made us human, what pushed us to the moon and beyond, but it’s perhaps in these tech-savvy times that we need something to bring us that sense of purity more than ever.

Thankfully Caterham exists. A company still building kit cars based on a design from some of the earliest days in Lotus’s incredible history; tweaking it with each new version, but never straying away from that original recipe.

We’ve really barely spent any time with our 310S, but it’s easy to see straight away why people fall in love with a Seven, why some will even spend months building one themselves just for that pure driving pleasure.

Take away the tech that normally keeps you facing forwards at all times, remove almost all of the mod-cons and the car is able to bring a sense of occasion to every drive. An ability to make you feel alive even if you’re just on that short hop to Sainsbury’s. Everything is you and you alone, find yourself in harmony with it and it will treat you like a king.

Maybe next week we’ll be a little less philosophical, but it’s almost hard to when each drive feels like a lesson.

MPG this week: 36.1

To find out more about Caterham click here