Caterham SP300R (2012) CAR review

There’s very little that’s more exhilarating than an R500, Caterham’s top-of-the-range 7; it wraps 263bhp and a 2.8sec 0-60mph time in a package that weighs little more than your basic coffin. But what next? What if you’ve simply acclimatised to being fired around a racetrack like a rocket on a rollerskate?

You might want to try this: the Caterham SP300R.

What is the Caterham SP300R? A Le Mans car?

Not quite. The SP300R is a collaboration between Caterham and Lola, Lola being the company that almost made it to F1 recently, but still has vast experience with endurance racing, and churns out LMP racers at an indecent rate. It’s a good fit: Caterham doesn’t have anything between the 7 and, well, an F1 car, and Lola doesn’t do any business below LMP2 level.

The SP300R will cost £67.5k before taxes (taking it to £81k in the UK) and Caterham’s business plan calls for 25 units a year. According to Caterham, initial interest suggests this target will be exceeded, sales coming from both rich trackday enthusiasts and the even more serious types who’ll sign up for the one-make race series that’ll be along shortly.

What are the SP300R’s ingredients?

The story goes that Lola had a driving-school race car in the US that they thought could work for Caterham, Caterham had a gander and decided to use that car’s basic suspension pick-up points and its Formula 3-style rear end. The rest is new, designed by Lola, but manufactured entirely by Caterham.

It’s based on an aluminium honeycomb tub with a lightweight polyurethane body, while a 2.0-litre supercharged Ford Duratec engine – the basic engine is in a similar state of tune to the non-supercharged R400, with a less extreme cam profile than the R500 – makes 301bhp yet weighs just 545kg. That’s 552bhp-per-tonne, which compares rather favourably with some run-of-the-mill supercars: the 562bhp Ferrari 458 makes 367bhp-per-tonne, for instance.

Despite this, Caterham says it’s compromised on all-out performance in the name of making the SP300R more manageable for the inexperienced. Hence it’s been designed with the intention that mechanical grip and aero grip will bleed into one another, rather than an all-out aero experience, which can be too far beyond the novice racer.

It’s got lights! Is it a road car?

No, rivals Radical do produce road-going versions of its similar offerings, but that’s not the intention for the SP300R. Instead, Caterham motorsport manager Simon Lambert explains that the SP300R has lights because that makes it look more like a credible proposition. So, you’ll be needing a tow bar and a call to Brian James trailers to get to that trackday or race.

There’s also, you may have spotted, a passenger seat, plus the option of left- or right-hand drive.

What’s it like to drive?

Incredible. Unless you’re an experienced racer, the prospect of driving the SP300R will be fairly intimidating; it’s a very serious looking thing, and the process of climbing over that thick body and almost lying down in the cockpit as your harnesses are tightened up gets your heart pumping before you’ve flicked the ignition toggle. Your elbows are tucked close to your body, your legs straight and close together too.

Flick that toggle, give it a squirt of throttle and the four pot barks into action, buzzing through the tub and tickling all the points of your body that are in contact with the car: your feet, fingertips and, yes, your backside.

The SP300R uses a six-speed sequential paddleshift transmission, but there’s a clutch to get moving which is pretty easy to modulate. There’s also a tight turning circle and, of course, no reverse gear – a team of men helps me to get out of the pit garage and into the pits.

Go on, then, give it some welly!

As the stats suggest, this feels like a ferociously fast car, even if you’re accustomed to supercars. Flatten the throttle in second and you’ll surge violently forward – the kind of acceleration that genuinely takes your breath away – but the power curve is incredibly even, making it easy to feed in very precise amounts of this devastating performance. There’s ample torque too: at times I found there to be very little difference between using all the revs in third or short-shifting up to fourth.

The sound is all-pervasive, a loud, harsh, nasally din that shrieks and shrieks and urges you on. Use all the revs and pull the right-hand paddle and – thunk – the next gear slots home super quickly and it all happens over again. For those first few laps, it’s difficult to actually break down the experience and think about what’s happening, but slowly you acclimatize to the speed, and slowly you start to break the process down into its consecutive parts.

The throttle response is naturally very, very keen, and the steering – while initially actually quite light – gets incredibly heavy as you lean on those slick tyres and exploit the vast reserves of lateral grip that this thing generates; after ten laps I’m aching just below my armpits from the combination of having my arms tucked close to my body and the forces that my muscles are attempting to resist. The brakes are naturally mighty, but the pedal feel is reassuringly friendly: you don’t press a solid, unyielding pedal, but one with a little give as you push past those first few millimetres and feel the pressure feeding back and building on the ball of your foot.

What also strikes you is that, in some ways, the SP300R is easier to drive than a normal fast car on a track: aim for an apex at high speed and you’ll kiss it, then open the steering and move to the kerbing on the outside of the bend and, once again, the car moves exactly where you point it. There’s no destabilizing squat under heavy braking, no roll to drag you off line as you turn into a fast bend, you point, the car obeys.

Perfect for an amateur, then?

Yes and no. Yes, in as far as it’s very friendly and benign when you’re driving it at seven or eight tenths. No, in that you need to be on your money when you nibble at the SP300R’s limits, because you’re already travelling very quickly, so naturally things go wrong very quickly too.

In slower corners – the ones where the aero effect isn’t yet working – you’ll feel the nose push wide under progressive, measured acceleration. But you can very quickly bring the rear into play, and I didn’t think this was hugely easy to feel coming – instead I learnt that the car was about to slide, and adjusted my driving to suit. To bypass that understeer phase altogether, you need to go in very late on the brakes and turn in, tucking the nose to the apex and using the weight of the engine behind you to rotate the car into the bend.

In higher speed corners, oversteer can also come very quickly and you need to be very speedy with the opposite lock to prevent a one-to-one meeting with the Armco that’s just flashed into view. With my road-car background, I’m more used to a car’s body starting to roll, and it’s treaded tyres starting to slip as pointers that a slide is imminent.

Verdict

The Caterham SP300R is a mind-blowingly special thing to drive. It’s actually very easy for a novice to this open-cockpit stuff to clamber into and start posting some respectable lap times, and the power delivery, brakes, steering and gearbox make it a friendly, easy experience too. Yes, it gets trickier when you start to push at the limits, but that’s the nature of the beast when performance gets this serious, and the thrill of getting to grips with it is utterly addictive. I want another go, please.