Caterham 170 experience

TL;DR Nürburgring part deux February 24th marks the anniversary of the first year of ownership. Probably 500 hours spent driving, for a total just above 25 000 km. As far as I know, that's the Caterham 170 with the highest mileage and the most performant engine (to date). The blog now contains 95 posts, that's 300 pages in print form. To celebrate and make the most of a nice warm week-end, we went through all of the best places nearby : Northeastern part of the Belgian Ardenne on Saturday afternoon then the Vesdre valley and East Cantons down to Visé in the evening. On Sunday, the High Fens, Eifel area, Rursee then down to Nürburgring. That's again 500 km and 10 hours in the car over a single week-end.  A good opportunity to get accustomed to the limited slip differential fitted two weeks prior. The Quaife ATB is a good match for the new ECU and stage 3 turbo, the setup is much more cohesive. Gone is the rodeo-like experience of the last month. In a word : resolute - you...

This was retroactively christened " Caterham & Boterham Tour #1 ".  Boterham is dutch for sandwich. With winter soon over, we thought it would be great to meet with the usual bunch of the Caterham owners that usually attend the Static Rally in Wavre. After a month of back-and-forth, Christophe was the one to take the initiative of preparing a roadbook and propose a burger joint for lunch. Decided on Friday morning for Sunday noon, that was an efficient shot-notice event ! We managed to get 7 Caterham at 11:00 at the agreed meeting point, and moved on for a short blat in the countryside of Brabant Wallon (BW). It was very agricultural to say the least, with B-roads all along. Not the fastest nor the cleanest, but more enjoyable than the pointless straight and flat main roads of the area. Knowing that we would go near the place where I did my weight check in August, we thought it would be a fun activity. What better idea than a weighbridge for a "Light is Right"...

TL;DR 1200 km in winter with no LSD yet    I got the car back from MH7 on January 25h, we did fiddle a bit to get the fuel pump running . We'll probably adjust the signal more finely in the future. The road back from Genk felt a bit like a rodeo, on wet with my summer tyres and the throttle pedal mapping that was quite agressive on both ECU settings. I was not able to stabilise the speed to 120kph as the throttle input was RPM-dependent. As I had to get back there to pick-up my regular car, we quickly set a flat/linear throttle response in "commute/wet" mode and kept the exhilarating exponential throttle on the "sport" mode. This gave quite an improvement on the motorway.  We even talked about activating a cruise control function, and why not some traction control as well as we have a sensor on each rear wheel. That would be a lot of functionality for the weight of 2 switches hidden under the dashboard. Other than that, I didn't fully anticipat...

  TL;DR how to replace a light bulb, part II - keep incandescent bulbs Not unlike the time the speedometer bulb died just after fiddling in the vicinity, the bulb of the windscreen washers switch failed right after routing the wires for the ECU drive mode too close to it. That was again just a happy coincidence, the power supply to the bulb connectors was all fine. The filament just burned out. Duckduckgo led me to this 12 years old post , after what the trail of the "BU15 LES lamp 14V" finally gave me the "E5" socket, and the fact that 14V 0.7 Watts was what I needed for those Rover-looking rocker switches. It looks like a good search prompt would be "E5 LES Miniature Bulb, 5mm 14V 0.7W". I placed an order for a seemingly suitable LED alternative in warm white, and was sent a 10-pack of miniature train bulbs - with 11 pieces in it. Opening the switch is fiddly but nothing too complicated. I found that slices of thin rigid card helped keeping the knubs ...

TL;DR lipstick on a pig 🐖 With Winter came the second appearance of my set of steel wheels with snow tyres .  Really convenient and safe on cold and/or wet surfaces, those are a must if you want to enjoy a Caterham all year round. But they were really lacking in style, and I didn't feel like putting the fugly yellow wheel trims this time. The rims on the rear are really rusty-crusty and a better-looking pair is already waiting for the current tyres to need a replacement. Anyway, looking for something a bit different, I stumbled upon this set of stainless steel rim rings sold by Hansen Styling Parts .  They looked like a good solution to dress-up the Peugeot/Citroen steels. While the webshop advertises them at 2kg a piece, they weigh a more reasonable and predictable 2kg for the set of 4.  Shipping to Germany would have been free of charge, for Belgium UPS did cost me ca 18€; the order was there in 2 days. Installation is easy as they pop in place like your regular trim...