Caterham Super Seven 1600

With the temperatures falling I did a final drive before the car heads to the garage. The new Caterham dealership HWM had an Open Day today at their workshop in Hersham. As the air temperature was barely above freezing I used the half-hood and heater on full blast. A pretty comfortable set up and I didn't need a jacket in the car. Others braved it with aero-screens ! The workshop is nice and clean. Currently full of cars from the old Gatwick facility.  The new London Central AR David North has his car waiting for collection after its rebuild. A couple of Astons and an Alfa dotted around.  Outside they have 2 full paint booths, doing overflow work for the factory.. With my car still under warranty till next August, I'll be getting my car serviced here in June.

With the continued excellent weather in southern England today we went to an event at Bicester Heritage, an old WW2 RAF base repurposed as a classic car venue. There were free passes for a small number of Caterhams as part of a display. There were hundreds of cars in the main area and then hundreds more out in the fields surrounding the air strip. A really great collection of cars, here's just a few of my favourites. 308 still looking sharp.. As does this ! Thanks to Jack Phillips at Bicester Heritage for the free pass.

Today we went to an Open Day run by Lotus specialist Malcolm Ricketts. This was at his workshops out in Wheathampsted. He has a great collection of early Lotus vehicles, and many more turned-up ! There was huge selection of cars on display, from the first race cars, 6's and 7's, through to Elites, Elans, and Esprits.  

So a final weekend of sunshine for the summer and I headed to the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club London Concours. This was held at the Hare & Hounds in Osterley. I finally got to meet the West London owners club people, having met the AR Geoff at the Fish & Chip run earlier in the year. A nice selection of cars, mostly fairly new vehicles. My car looking fab in the sun.. And I won the trophy for 'Best Four pot'..

Last weekend I did a final trip of the summer, a blast up to Morecambe for the Vintage by the Sea festival. This is an annual vintage-themed event, which includes a car show. As usual I didn't decide to go until 2 days before the event, with the weather looking great all weekend. The show was taking place in the car park of the Midland hotel, the classic Art Deco building in Morecambe. Having booked a room in the hotel I then had to contact the event organisers to arrange a permit to be able to park there. No problem with my vintage-style car ! I left London on the Friday afternoon, to do a stopover just outside Manchester. This left a one hour drive to the event on Saturday morning. I arrived just in time to park next to Chris's excellent Delorean. The show had a real mix of cars. A good day with lots of very nice people dressed up in vintage gear, although it did get pretty warm by the afternoon. Hope to go again next year.

Having purchased a GoPro Max I initially tested doing 360 degree videos. However, recording audio with the built-in GoPro microphone just sounds terrible. So I record the sound using a separate Zoom H1n audio recorder. Then I have to edit the video and audio track together. I only have iMovie and I ran into a problem with the 360 videos. When you export the video from iMovie the 360 image is incorrectly stitched together, giving a weird seam which looks really bad.  So today I decided to do a test using Hero mode on the GoPro instead of 360 mode. I think the results are much better, and the video is in mp4 format straightaway. There are no problems using iMovie, removing the original audio and then adding my new stereo track. Whilst 360 videos are kinda fun, I think this Hero mode video is better quality and the audio sounds great!

Today was the first annual service. A last trip to Caterham Gatwick before it closes in September. I've done 4,600 miles. A good effort ! Still quite a lot of activity there, but they are winding down. There will be no Factory service option when it closes. All servicing will be through the dealerships. They are still building Sigma-engined road cars for export to Japan. There's 2 of them here. They saved a batch of engines just for them. There were also some 420s and 620s waiting for delivery. My car had no particular issues. They changed the oil and tightened some bolts, that was all. On leaving there was another Super Seven 1600, one of the first cars. Apparently it also lives in Romford. They only made 40 cars so that's quite a coincidence !

Last weekend was the Big Picnic, an owner's club event in aid of Prostate Cancer Research (PCR). It's held at the home of club member Barry Searle, on his 70 acre estate in Ashton Hayes just outside Chester. As the weather forecast looked amazing I signed-up the week before. With the picnic on the Saturday I decided to do a visit to Morecambe first on Friday to see a friend, stay overnight there, and then drive down to Ashton Hayes on the Saturday morning. I could stay overnight in Chester before driving back to London on Sunday morning. With hotels booked it was an early night on Thursday.. With so much traffic on the roads I much prefer driving first thing in the morning. So I'm up at 4am and leave London at 5am, heading round the M25 to the M11 and up to Cambridge. My plan is to do the A1(M)/A1 up to Wetherby, and then cut across through the hills and moors to Morecambe. It's quite cold in the morning so I start out with the half hood on. With the heater and my over-