Caterham 170 experience

  TL;DR the Anti-Knight Rider Not all heroes wear capes. This one is a kid that sometimes wear goggles and happens to drive a freakin' yellow Caterham. In a world where robotaxi "AI" electric cars are the norm, select teams of licensed "gasoline" drivers are in charge of saving passengers victims of rogue or othewise runaway self-driving vehicles.  You would expect high-tech remote systems, but very little of that here : they stop cars by chasing and circling them, most of the time taking care of blocking sensors by projecting some kind of gloop. That future is sadly now. I hope Teslas would stop too if their cameras were blocked by a gloop-gun. Fool around and find out... I guess. Our boy Sōichi works with teammates Lorna who drives a Lotus Europa, and Lisa who drives a Lancia Stratos; having crashed her Subaru Impreza WRC in the first episode. Car details are excellent, and production went as far as recording actual engine sound for each  of them.  Harmless e...

The latest issue of Caterham 7 Journal, published every quarter by the Caterham Car Club , came in today.  Quite a nice suprise to see my crash featured in the "Telegram/Facebook news" section, and even better my full article covering the Nürburgring backstage visit in print form, spread over 6 pages with the german translation. It happened that a few weeks ago, Andreas asked if anybody would have something to share or talk about. I did hint that I have over a hundred posts on this blog, and that he was welcome to use anything of interest.   So here we are 😊   The result is great, combining proper photographs (not only the ones we took with our phones) with the original version on the right, and the german translations on the left.    To be noted, you couldn't imagine the effort it takes to manage that publication, especially this time with the new calendar. The stacks of cartons to be delivered to the post office filled a good part of Andreas' c...

  TL;DR featuring in a book As usual, this is a long-ish term project. Gérard Taës (who I don't know personally) is a car enthusiast with a passion for editing automotive picture books that let proud owners show off their most cherished possessions. This is done under the EDITIONS LE LIVRE brand. His marketing seems to be based around very non-instrusive publications on car owners Facebook groups. Anyway, a first Caterham book has been published somewhere in 2022 - you can go through a digital version here - and a second edition is planned for 2025. Knowing that some mods were expected early this year, the plan was to have a dedicated photo shoot with my DSLR camera and provide good quality pictures for my submission. That plan was obviously under the threat of the close encounter of the wild kind. Luckily, we did take some good pictures just 45 minutes before the accident, they feature my new wheels and the late afternoon light is quite appropriate. They are located on the roof...

TL;DR it would be nice to keep a tangible copy of all my ramblings With the long-form posts written in the past few weeks, I come to thing I wouldn't want to lose that content and those memories the day Google decide to shutdown the Blogger platform. After checking out and testing some blog to print services, PixxiBook seemed like a good choice with great result out of the box. With very little room for customisation as they aim at having it right on the first time. With the blog as it is now, I would reach the 300 pages limit already. The posts about the visit of the Caterham factory last week already account for 20 pages. At 120€, this is far from cheap for a book, but why not do it once a year ?  Or each time I have 300 pages worth of content ?  No that I would hope to reach the size limits more than once a year, that would be insane, even for me. For the fun of it, I definitely need a post about the book, so it's included in said book. For good measure it would include a...

TL;DR classy AF swag, +5000 street cred' I know, it's a replica and the Caterham lettering is too straight to be honest. The original has something of an official product, featured in the "Caterham Airways" advertisement , and  proudly displayed on the dashboard of the famous LE60-CAT 620R press car. Mine is way smaller and tucked on the fusebox cover. Note that the color of the 'LE60-CAT' 620R at Goodwood is correct for once. See the visit to the Caterham factory for more detail .

TL;DR ok but only on glass units Just for the classic motorsport looks. Like the guys and girls that take part in the Caterham Academy and Cateham Roadsport championships. But they do it to prevent spreading shattered glass on the racetrack and to identify different groups of drivers using different tape colors. I won't insult you with a how-to for this one. I kept the black Xs on the headlights for about 2 months, until the upgrade to the NS-2270 LED optics. Removing the tape was easy, but the glue was somewhat cooked and did require some serious acetone persuasion to leave the glass. Keep acetone away from any paint or plastic surface , do it with the beam out of the metal ring. Knowing this, I wouldn't tape plastic optics.    

  Don't misunderstand me, I have no issue with advertising House of Speed on the back of my car. I'm really pleased with all the interactions I've had with the whole team and highly recommend them. What I didn't like was the yellow lettering on my very yellow car. The branding is on the licence plate holder anyway. So I replaced the garage sticker with a more personal one. The source of the design is a graffiti written with a white paint marker on a shop entrance made of belgian blue stone, of which I took a picture on Nov 1st 2010. The meaning can be translated as FUCK GREY ! - The hell with grey as a color, as a symbol of everything boring, and bad weather as well for good measure. The irony is that my greying hair and my firstname lead to people ask me if it's my new nickname. A bit like Gandalf the Grey. The design was vectorized and cut by my friend Laurent, owner of La Buche Design . We opted for silver as an extra ironic touch, and to match the SEVEN 170 S ...

    A first round of modifications of the Lego 620R model.    -    You will find part I here I got it second-hand parly disassembled, and did rebuild it with the exhaust, steering wheel and pedals on the left side to match my car. The wheels were flipped inside-out. The LEGO Technic figures were already in my possession, but I got an extra one all in white, as a Stig figure. Custom licence plates were ordered from our Dutch neighbours from https://bedrukjeblokje.nl/ it's nice that they offer belgian plates besides the 3 versions of dutch ones. An order was placed to the online LEGO shop, where each piece was carefully selected : Yellow front arches A 5th wheel and support to put it on the back as a spare wheel The missing handbrake part A new steering wheel as the provided one was quite loose. The addition of the spare wheel did free the 2x4 yellow flat piece with the double stripes, that I have repurposed to modifty the front of the hood to ge...

  We all saw it coming at this point.    LEGO set reference is #21307 .    I got it second-hand on Amazon for around 50€, of all places. The current market is close 200-300€, but I won't feed the scalpers.   It was complete except the hand-brake that was missing. A very good deal.   I will modify it to make it look more like mine.   -   first set of mods, read part II here