Why the quirky Caterham 21 couldn't survive the Lotus Elise

Nobody wants to be known as a one-trick pony or to be told to ‘stay in your lane’, but equally it’s also good to know what you excel at. This is something Caterham is acutely aware of, because for the past 50-odd years it has owed its existence to one extremely exciting offering: the Seven. Ever since company founder Graham Nearn bought the rights to the lightweight roadburner from Lotus in 1973, it has continued to hone and refine the Seven into a car that, for many, is one of the most thrilling driving experiences on earth. Yet while the business is strong today, Caterham has experienced its ups and downs in the past. And when you’ve only really got a single product to sell, you leave yourself vulnerable if your customers get fickle and look elsewhere for their kicks. So with the recession of the early 1990s still strong in the memory, Nearn and his team decided it was time to diversify. In many respects, the idea was a simple one. The Seven was a sensational but rather single-minded machine – one that required almost motorcyclist-levels of masochism to use on a daily basis. If Caterham could create a flagship model that added a welcome dose of continent-crossing civility to the Seven’s scintillating dynamics, then it could be onto a winner. The result was the 21. Launched at the 1994 British motor show to coincide with the brand’s 21st birthday (hence the name; the multiplication of seven is merely a happy accident), the new car’s conception was relatively straightforward. To keep things simple and development costs down, the 21 featured a strengthened version of the Seven’s spaceframe chassis, including its unequal-length front suspension and de Dion rear axle. There was even a similar line-up of Rover K-series engines. The biggest differences were visual, with the addition of a voluptuous aluminium body designed by Caterham’s Iain Roberston, who penned it shortly before joining Autocar as our deputy news editor. Inside, there was a properly designed dashboard, decent space for two and soft leather trim as far as the eye could see. There was even a proper 250-litre boot, and while the folding fabric roof was a bit of a fiddle, it was easier to erect than the Seven’s byzantine covering. Better still, all the creature comforts added only 100kg to the kerb weight. When we sampled the original show car, complete with stunning polished-alloy bodywork, we were impressed, then road test editor Andrew Frankel declaring: “It is, if you like, a Seven without the strings. It has a big boot and blots out the elements well enough to make a two-week European tour not simply possible but natural and appealing. It lacks the everyday practicality of, say, a TVR Chimaera and is better described as a compact Chrysler Viper with none of the bulk but all of the performance.” Quite the fulsome verdict. So, how come you’ve probably never heard of the 21? Well, for all its ambition and promise, it was scuppered by time and timings. Caterham planned on building around 200 per year (a third of Seven production), but it dragged its heels at a time when affordable roadsters were becoming quite the thing. Its engineers kept going back to the drawing board to refine the design, including ditching the aluminium bodywork for composite moulded panels. The result was that fully representative customer cars took a while to come on stream, meaning we weren’t able to subject it to a full road test until 1997. By then the game had moved on. The 21 handled and performed with the panache you would expect, but it was hobbled by wearisome noise, vibration and harshness and irritations such as side windows that could be ‘opened’ only by unscrewing them. As we noted at the time: “Unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool enthusiast who needs a certain amount of pain merely to enjoy the pleasure, the likelihood is that you would either buy a practical roadster such as a BMW Z3 or have a second car. In which case the Seven does everything that the 21 does, only better.” Ouch. However, what really scuppered the 21 was the Lotus Elise. Arriving in 1996, it showed the Caterham (and every other contender) just how good a back-to-basics sports car could be. And the killer blow was that this sophisticated upstart also undercut the £25,000 Caterham by £5000. Incredibly, the 21 soldiered on until 1999 – but by the time the plug was quietly pulled, fewer than 50 examples had been made.

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Why the quirky Caterham 21 couldn't survive the Lotus Elise

Caterham is famous for the single-minded Seven, but 30 years ago it tried to build an everyday roadster

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Why the quirky Caterham 21 couldn't survive the Lotus Elise

Caterham is famous for the single-minded Seven, but 30 years ago it tried to build an everyday roadster

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Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

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Legal bits

About Autocar