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.