Eventually, “C7 GPU” will be the registration plate I put onto a 2017 Caterham Seven 420R. I put a deposit down on the car in late May this year and I’ll collect it somewhere in the middle of August, just a month or so away.
\nI’ve got a 22 year old Renaultsport Clio 182 that I’m in the middle of restoring, spending a good chunk of time, effort and money on mechanical upgrades and general TLC for it last year.
\nI had planned to keep going with that project this year as my weekend toy, before taking a break next year to save for my wedding, but my big tech employer’s share price has increased heavily in the last year and I’ve decided to take advantage of that by going all in on a Seven.
\nI’d always told myself that when I could, after needing to sell my last “nice” car (a 2019 mk7.5 VW Golf R) a couple of years ago to put the money together to buy a house, I’d get an Audi R8 of some kind when money allowed. I’d driven a V10 Plus Spyder on a track experience day and it blew my socks off with how it sounded, and how fast and capable it was when driven hard, even by someone like me that’d never been behind the wheel of one before.
\nSo when the share price started to take off I got stuck into serious research about the myriad variants and their mid-life facelifts, common upgrades, ongoing maintenance and service intervals, powertrain combinations, and the common faults, so I could educate myself about what to get and what running costs would probably be like.
\nCars like that often cost a small fortune to run in some way, and while it’s a Volkswagen Audi Group product and should have some modicum of reliability and a common parts bin it shares with other models and marques under the VAG umbrella, you should always do your research to make sure that you can really afford to not just buy, but also care for, maintain and service your car to keep it in excellent condition.
\nThat’s especially true for anything very expensive like an Audi R8, especially anything like it that was very expensive brand new and where there’s possibly no way to get a factory warranty due to age.
\nThe dream of an R8 fell apart almost immediately after my research started. The specialist experts for the car in the UK are REPerformance and they produce excellent YouTube videos that primarily cover various diagnostic and repair issues on a wide range of R8s both old and new.
\nThose videos continue to be eye opening, especially around Audi’s treatment of the R8 in terms of it being a heritage car that now requires ongoing production of mechanical parts to help with repairs or to address common issues and faults. Audi don’t seem to give a shit about the car in that respect, even though production only stopped just over two years ago in March 2024.
\nOn top of that, and especially with the V10, many engine-related issues that can be considered relatively common require the engine to come partially or fully out of the car. At that point, labour costs skyrocket, and so it’s easy for reasonably common fault finding and remedies to come with waits of several months for parts availability and huge bills.
\nMy employer’s share price might be doing well, but I want a car where repair and maintenance time is sensibly minimal and doesn’t stop me enjoying it whenever I want to, and where the money I put in is by choice for things like upgrades rather than big bills to fix things.
\nA Seven is the exact opposite of an R8 in many ways. Mechanically and electronically it’s very simple and there’s a readily available glut of parts, meaning it’s easy to work on and repair. A lot of that service and repair work is possible at home, even without being an experienced mechanic, and membership of the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club gives you access to very high quality guides and manuals for the car.
\nIt’s also very light, so consumables like brake discs and pads don’t need to be changed very often, and wear parts like bushings and suspension componentry rarely need attention until age becomes a factor.
\nThe light weight of the car is core to my enthusiasm in many ways, since it’s what underpins several of the things about a Seven that I find incredibly appealing. Lotus’ original design ethos of making the Seven as simple and as light as possible have been carried through by Caterham into the modern Seven era, allowing me to still take advantage of that philosophy in a Seven built 60 (yes, sixty!) years after Lotus produced the first in 1957.
\nSo a modern Seven is where I’ve ended up, C7 GPU is the registration it’ll wear, and I’m very excited to start my journey with the car in about a month’s time.
\nIt’s given me the itch to write again, so I’ll do so as much as I can about it here as time goes by, starting with the specification and why I chose a 420R in particular, and keep that going hopefully for a great many years to come.
"}, {"id": "https://caterhamseven.uk/post/privacy-policy", "title": "Privacy Policy", "date_published": "2026-07-03T23:22:09+00:00", "url": "https://caterhamseven.uk/post/privacy-policy", "content_html": "This post outlines the privacy policy for caterhamseven.uk. The website is only delivered to your browser using HTTPS and at least TLS v1.2 as the transport, using certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.
\nThe site has the following privacy-respecting policy features:
\nSo not only are there no trackers, ads, client-side JS, or analytics and traffic monitoring of any kind, I can’t even tell if you visited the website since there are no transient or persistent logs of your visit.
\nYou get to know about me and the car from my writing, but I don’t get to know anything about you, which is about as private as I can make it.
"}]}