You can't park there mate

Wednesday, Sep 23, 2026 · 2590 words · approx 9 mins to read

I’ve already had a such a storied start with the car in just a few months, finding out it started life in 2016 as a 360R with sequential gearbox built using Caterham’s Signature program and was then upgraded to 420R spec in 2018, which all came to light after I’d put down the deposit.

I didn’t expect to add another dramatic tale of my own to the overall story so soon after picking it up. I’m recently back from a week with it in Cornwall at the beginning of the month, enjoying some excellent spirited driving on some of the county’s great driving roads, and drove it to visit a dear friend in Henley-on-Thames just a few days ago on Saturday (19th September 2026 for anyone visiting from the future).

That drive on Saturday wasn’t so great on the way up, but the one on the way back to Worthing was a lot of fun. It rained a little up in Henley just as I was leaving, so I got the chance to experience the car in the (very slight) wet for the first time, before I outran the rain clouds and hit mostly empty roads all the way back into Sussex and home. The car felt great and I was on a high with it after the great week in Cornwall at the start of September.

So after garaging it on Saturday night and checking the forecast for the following morning, I set my alarm for 0630 after deciding to get up for an early morning drive while the roads were quiet. It was set to rain a little in the night but not in the day, and when I woke up in the morning the roads were a touch damp but weren’t what I’d call wet.

I set off around 0730, taking it very easy while I waited for proper dry lines to show up, heading north on the A24 to get some 99 octane from a Shell I sometimes get fuel from. I was on the other side of a roundabout one away from the Shell station, having navigated entry and exit to cross over it and get another 30-40 metres down the road, when very suddenly the rear end of the car decided it wanted to be the one leading me up the road. I ended up in a big hedge on the left side of the road very shortly afterwards, backwards, at what I think was around 30-40mph.

My side of the car took the impact as it slid into the big hedge at the side of the road, and thankfully I didn’t collect any other car on my way into nature because the road was empty. I phoned Jenny and the police, let them know what had happened and where I was, and then sat there for a little while taking stock and wondering how to get out because I was properly in the hedge, driver’s side of the car very much in it and no way to open my door or get out through my side of the cage.

While working out how to get out a couple of very nice passers by stopped to ask if I was OK and I told them I was fine and the police were on their way to help me deal with things, and then a convoy of Sevens passed going the other way on the other side of the dual carriageway, towards the roundabout I’d just crossed! I waved but I think I was too far in the bush for anyone in the convoy to really clock me.

I took stock of how I felt to make sure I was alright to try and get out of the car. I could feel all fingers and toes, and while my head and right shoulder hurt, I couldn’t find any blood. The harness had done a terrific job keeping me where I was while the crash happened, but it obviously doesn’t hold my head in safety, just my body. I’d boshed the back right side of my head a little bit on the cage after the car hit the hedge and rapidly slowed down and stopped, but nothing to make me bleed or lose consciousness.

So I climbed out of the passenger side of the cage and waited for the police, a bit shaken up and worse for wear mentally as I looked at the state of the car. I couldn’t see any fluids coming out and I couldn’t smell fuel, but neither did I want to try and drive it out. The front suspension on the right side had lost a lower wishbone and the front wheels weren’t pointing in the same direction any more. If you swear here while reading that, be assured I also did when I saw what that looked like.

The policewoman from Sussex Police that arrived on the scene not long afterwards was great. She made sure I was alright, closed the lane nearest my new favourite bush, and asked me if I had recovery cover on my insurance policy. I couldn’t remember if I had, couldn’t figure it out from reading my policy documents on my phone, so she called a recovery company (Westbourne Motors) for me who said they’d be there in about 30 mins.

Jenny then showed up, having sped from our house to where I was to make sure I was OK. She ran from the car to where I was and saw me standing by the car on the side of the road with a grin on my face, as if to say, “I wasn’t joking, my Seven is actually in a bush”, and started laughing and shaking her head because she knew that meant I was OK. Cue the first occurance of many that day of “you can’t park there mate”.

I assure everyone that, yes, I can actually park there if I want to.

Westbourne would ideally have taken the car back to my house that day for me to poke and prod and make plans with, but company policy said it had to go back to their local base and couldn’t be collected that same day because it was a Sunday. The cynic in you might say that’s so they can collect exorbitant overnight and weekend storage fees, but they didn’t charge me any of those at all. I had the car moved the morning after but I was only charged the “light vehicle” recovery fee and no storage fees of any kind. Thanks, Westbourne!

I had the car taken directly to Partridge Green Motorsport early on Monday morning, still more than a little shook up by what had happened, by a fantastic little recovery company that was very kind to the car while loading at Westbourne’s site and unloading in front of PGM’s workshop shortly afterwards. I can’t thank the universe enough for having me end up living so close to one of the UK’s leading experts on Sevens, and Westbourne’s site where the car was kept overnight is just 10 minutes or so away from Andy, Graham and the rest of the team at PGM.

Andy, PGM’s head honcho, walked round the car with me and we talked about the accident and how it might have happened, and what the end result is on the car. My incredibly good fortune is that nothing seems to have done any damage at all to the chassis, and that everything that bent or found itself taken off the car in the impact, or moved away from where it should be, did so sympathetically in terms of damaging the car in a way that would make it economically a bad idea for my insurance company to want to pay to fix it.

I lost a front wishbone and pushed the front suspension in, the engine moved a little on its mounts but its pulleys didn’t kiss the oil tank, the right side rear suspension took a solid hit and bent the A-frame construction underneath the car, and the de-Dion bar isn’t the right shape any more, but all of that is actually good in terms of repair. It means that the energy of the impact dissipated into things that aren’t the main chassis, leaving that alone. The low speed of the impact helped there too of course, but the chassis being fine is definitely the best possible outcome in an accident in a Seven. That being bent means you start by getting a completely new chassis and the full car is rebuilt from the ground up into it. You don’t want that.

The front of the car also had a bit of a mare, with a big hedge branch moving the nose cone a bit and ripping the front number plate off, and the front wheel impact pushed the headlight into the nose cone which made a mess of its fibreglass and paint.

So lots of miserable damage to the right side of the car, especially the suspension and the body panels, but I also have a full Nitron R3 suspension system in my office that arrived recently and hasn’t made its way onto the car yet, and I had also already planned to repaint the car a different colour this winter.

So while things are broken, a lot of what’s broken I planned to modify anyway. My insurance policy will pick up the tab of getting the car repaired and then I’ll pick up the tab to move the car forwards with upgrades and changes both mechanical and bodywork related, all with PGM at the helm. My insurance underwriter has worked with them many times on repairing other crash damaged Sevens so I’m in very good hands on both sides (even if my insurer doesn’t like being the one using their bank balance).

I mentioned in my post about insuring the car that finding an insurer for the car was difficult because of the specialist nature of the car. That means I have a specialist insurer for it that understands them well, including what to do when things go wrong like they have for me. I’ll write more about the repair and upgrade process with PGM and Howden as time goes by.

Lastly, I wanted to write about how the accident happened in the first place. I mentioned I’d just crossed a roundabout and wasn’t going particularly fast, and that because it was damp still and early in the morning I was taking it very easy. I was heading straight at the time, too, with no steering input, so why did the back end of the car suddenly snap round like that, rapidly and with no warning?

I don’t know for certain, but the leading theory put forward by both the police and Andy at PGM is that I hit a patch of diesel which made me rapidly lose traction and head off into the scenery. According to the police, that roundbout and the stretch of road after it towards the fuel station I was headed to is a known accident blackspot, meaning lots of other cars have had accidents around there, and not all of them from overly enthusiastic driving either but normal driving as I was doing. I found a few bits of BMW in my new favourite hedge as I was searching for bits of my Seven.

Added to that, apparently another car (an Ariel Nomad!) had a similar accident not too far up the road (although on the other side of the carriageway to me) on the same day, and that accident was definitely caused by a patch of diesel. I don’t know that any fuel on the road was the cause for sure in my case, and so I’m also very open to it being my fault too. I’d just shifted gear a couple of seconds before, so maybe that load and weight change in the car upset it on a cold damp road when I had no heat in the tyres yet. Maybe the revs flared too quickly because of a bump in the road making my foot hop on to the loud pedal, on damp and greasy tarmac.

Regardless of what caused it, it happened, and the main thing is I’m OK and didn’t hurt anyone else in the process. Cars can be fixed quite easily, but the meat sacks at the helm when accidents happen tend to be harder to put back together. The car was also damaged in a way that, so far anyway, PGM think is eminently fixable to a better state than it left my garage in just half an hour or so before I binned it. So I’m counting all of those particular blessings on the meat and metal sides.

So, now I’m looking forward to the car being fixed and coming back to me in a better colour than I bought it with. Not that I hate the green and orange but they’re not what I’d have picked if I was the original owner making choices with the Signature personalisation where they can paint the car any way you want. Plus, I’m upgrading it too which I’m very excited about.

I’ve mentioned the Nitron R3, but there’s also a bunch of excellent carbon fibre from Wesmo to go on the car as well that’s been in my garage for a few weeks, and I would also like to tackle some other mechanical and visual upgrades too. More on all of that in other posts.

Oops.