FUNDAMENTALLY FUN; Caterham makes a Super Seven with wiggle room.(Product/Service Evaluation)

Byline: KEVIN A. WILSON

If it doesn't make it go fast or make it legal to drive it on the road, it's not on the Caterham Super Seven. It has no radio, no cupholders, minimal bodywork, what roof there is resembles a pup tent more than a convertible top. The "doors'' are removable side curtains, useful to cut the wind on the freeway but more fun to drive without. Cross a shifter kart with a superbike and you're getting close to the sensations available in a Super Seven. We spent hours and hours behind the wheel, giving rides to the adventurous and explaining it to people too timid to get into something that looks, to modern eyes, frail.

It's not frail, really, no matter how it might seem from the cabin of a gargantuan SUV. This car was screwed, riveted and welded together about as tightly as anything we've driven lately. It's just there's not much of it: tubular space frame, skin-thin alloy and plastic body, engine and trans, four wheels, two seats so close to the ground you can reach out and file your nails on the pavement, a few instruments, three pedals and a steering wheel. The driver handles all traction control and brake antilock functions himself, and it's a blast.

Spartan though it may be, by Super Seven standards the car you see in these photos is practically decadent. Not only does it have a heater and the optional heated windshield glass, it's the Roadsport SV model. Compared with the competition-inspired Superlight R we wrote about early last year (AW, Feb. 17, 2003), the Roadsport SV has a 3.2-inch-longer wheelbase, wider track (by 6.9 inches in front, 4.3 in back) and larger cockpit, making it more suitable for weekend excursions with a tolerant passenger. In the Roadsport, the traditionalists' hair-shirt approach to all-out performance yields, if only a little, to the needs of everyday motoring. The de Dion rear axle, dual-wishbone front suspension and stiffer, larger, side-impact-protected frame all depart in the direction of sophistication and refinement from the original design, which Colin Chapman rolled out as the Lotus Seven in 1957. Equipped, as this sample was, with a 147-hp Ford Focus Zetec four-cylinder, the Roadsport SV will still run with a Corvette (though it won't beat it handily, as a 202-hp Superlight R can), but it won't leave your own aging frame aching afterward.

Chapman's design, which he once described as "the sort of thing you dash off in an afternoon,'' has been a sports car purist's touchstone in continuous production for 46 years now, the ultimate track-day machine for the driving enthusiast who just wants experience without all the froufrou. With Lotus itself ready to bring the similarly inspired Elise to this country-same elemental-motoring idea, executed with 21st-century technology-we thought it would be worth a look at a current Seven that might be as useful for weekend road outings. The Roadsport SV that was visiting at Ford's SVT outfit on loan from Caterham USA in Denver fit the bill perfectly.

Manufactured since 1973 by Caterham Cars, the Super Seven you can buy in America today (uscaterham.com) arrives in kit form, which means it's pretty much complete but without engine and transmission. The space-frame chassis resembles Chapman's design, but has aluminum honeycomb side-impact protection, that de Dion rear axle located by lower A-frame and Watts linkage and-the latest-the bigger frame. It allows for 3.2 inches more legroom, a cockpit 4.3 inches wider, and a pedal box two inches wider and one inch taller. Even this "big'' Roadsport has only a 90.7-inch wheelbase and 56.9-inch track front and rear; every inch counts in something this small. The foldable windshield is an inch taller than standard, too, so the roof (hood in Britspeak) is an inch higher.