Kari’s Caterham: Gone But Not Forgotten

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I wanted to be a rally driver, but I was wearing the big, fat boots preferred by rally correspondents to trample through the stages. Those boots meant my feet wouldn’t fit into the footwell and I could only stare at Kari’s Caterham the first time I saw it. That was 20 years ago; a memory still so vivid that I made sure to carry racing shoes to Generation Speed where Vicky Chandhok had brought the Caterham for its first public outing in a decade.

In the early ’90s Karivardhan – widely acknowledged as the father of Indian motorsport – bought the tooling for the DAX Caterham and AC Cobra kit cars and set up a line in Coimbatore to make India’s first sports cars. Three prototypes were completed with 1.8-litre pushrod engines, but before the production line could be completed or even the car christened (Vicky insists this was never called the Kari 65 Special), Kari passed away in an air accident (Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore was the runway for his microlights).

Two of these cars have now been restored, the green one for Kari’s brother-in-law Santharam running a Toyota engine, and this yellow one with the engine from the Formula 1600 single-seater. The intake trumpets sticking out of the engine bay make for a spectacular sight, so much so that at GenSpeed it attracted more attention than a similarly lurid yellow GT3 RS that was being unloaded as we filmed it.

These Lotus 7 replicas were light, agile, rear-wheel-drive and bare-bones. Thanks to my race shoes I can operate the three pedals, and it is so tightly spaced that heel-toe comes naturally. There’s no power steering. The intake shudders every time I blip it. The old 4-speed manual is retained, a beautifully short-throw and rifle-bolt action. The clutch surprises me by not murdering my left leg. Even the driving position is spot-on despite lacking much in the way of adjustability, and contrary to what you might think the seats are comfortable (once you get in, that is).

Operating it is simple. Turn the key, press the starter, remember to switch on the fan, and if you haven’t packed ear plugs prepare for an early onset of deafness. It’s insanely loud, especially with the side exhaust thundering just under my right elbow. Is it fast? Not particularly so, and of course one doesn’t wring the neck of old cars either. But the sensations are detailed, granular and properly exquisite.

You will never, ever experience anything like it in a modern car – the full-on wind in the hair experience, the responses so detailed you feel the texture of the runway through your palms and your backside. Hanging U-turns at the end of the runway, some gas, tail comes out, wind on lock, give more gas, exit in beautifully dialled in power oversteer. And to think that this is something our parents, our grandparents, could have indulged in at a time when the Maruti 800 was still in its infancy. We lost so much when we lost Kari.