Awesome vids Myles. Car must have been a blast to drive!
It was - think I did something like 40-50k miles I’m it - which is way above average for these cars.
It was instrumental in me meeting my partner too…
I was doing a European tour (on my own) with 20 or so similar vehicles and we were warming up our engines on the final morning at a hotel in France while we said our goodbyes. Someone came up to me an said that “your engine made a funny sound and then stopped….”. I tried to restart it but no dice. The car park was on a hill so we tried bumping it - but every time I dropped the clutch, the rear wheels locked…
Closer inspection (I didn’t have a cam belt cover) showed that I’d stripped the belt (and taken out several valves….) Oops.
We had another tour organised for around 7 weeks later in Scotland and I knew that I’d not be able to get the engine fixed in that time with work commitments and my limited facilities - but I did know of a fellow former tourer who had his bike-engined Westfield up for sale… …so as I was being driven back to the ferry in another 7, I agreed to buy the Westfield by text message (secured with a Scottish £1 note handed to one of his neighbours who was on tour with us…).
My Caterham was the original ‘S3’ sized chassis (same as the Academy cars in the sim) - which is a tight fit for two people at the best of times (let alone with luggage - and I’d basically been running it as a single seater so that I could pack it full of camera gear (another passion). The Westfield is approximately 10% bigger in every dimension - which doesn’t sound like much until you work out that’s 30% more volume - so you can ‘comfortably’ have a passenger without literally rubbing shoulders…
…and so the wife of one of the tour organisers did some matchmaking and the rest is history…
The Caterham went to Ireland (where our tour support truck lived at the time) and was fixed by some fellow tourers - but I never really drove it again as we always used the Westfield. It was kinda cool having a spare tour car in case of last minute issues, but the car really deserved to be used so I eventually sold it two years ago to partly fund my Boxster…
I do sometimes wonder if I should sell the Westfield and buy a similar-sized Caterham with some creature-comforts such as a windscreen, heater - maybe some doors and a roof? - but they’re pretty daft money these days and nine times out of ten we’d probably just take the Boxster…