Caterham has developed a new chassis which could make its famous Seven sports car even lighter than before.
The Caterham Seven is an iconic kit car already known for being incredibly light, weighing in at approximately just 550kg – less than half the weight of a new Ford Focus. But now Caterham, with the aid of a couple of other British companies, have created a new kind of chassis that could make the famously light Seven even lighter.
Tubing technology
The extra lightness achieved with this new chassis owes itself to bicycles. That’s because it uses butted tubing technology taken from bike production. This is the first ever car chassis to make use of such tech and allows Caterham to halve metal usage on the Seven while maintaining the same level of rigidity and strength as before.
Caterham has created this project with the support of bicycle tube-makers Reynolds Technology and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) consultancy Simpact.
Performance impact
Caterham says the new chassis could shed over 10 per cent off the Seven’s total weight if it were to be put into production. Losing around 50kg or more should shorten the Caterham’s zero to 62mph sprint time, sharpen up its handling to some extent and reduce the car’s braking distances.
Now that a prototype Seven using the bike technology has been created, Caterham will continue to develop this and are aiming to launch a production version ‘in due course’. Caterham are set to offer the new lighter chassis as an option for the Seven, which would cost customers between £1,000 and £2,000 to acquire.