Seven - Licensed To Thrill!

It took a whole boring week for the local DVLA office to process the registration paperwork, but finally - on 3rd June, exactly 5 months from the delivery of the kit, my car got the government green light and was declared road legal. So I hopped on a train over to Dartford, and went to pick up the post-build checked, IVA-tested, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed and de-briefed Seven!

Good thing I ordered the SV body... I need to lose some weight!

Whilst I was there, Kate was good enough to show me around the factory. It was Friday afternoon and the rest of the workforce had gone for the weekend, so it was pretty quiet. Lots of cars on the shop floor though. I guess business is going pretty well despite the recession.

Thanks for the tour Kate!

I finished up the paperwork, gave Kate back some duplicate parts I had accumulated over the past few months, climbed in, started up, and headed home. It was great to be behind the wheel of a Seven on the open road again - over a year since I had last enjoyed the experience. It was an uneventful drive around the M25, very busy on a Friday evening of the half-term week. But hey - the sun was shining and I had a smile on my face even stuck in the traffic!

After I got home I had a good look under the bonnet to see what had been changed during the PBC and IVA tests. There didn't seem to be a huge amount done - the engineer had tidied up the battery cable wiring and improved the ECU ground connection, plus added some extra sleeving in a few places on the lighting harness. Obviously all the suspension components and tracking had been properly aligned, and the lights adjusted. On the road, the car felt properly tight and responsive, with no pulling to either side even under braking. The gearbox and diff were fine, plenty of clonking and grumbling noises which was pretty much as expected!

I'm still a little perplexed over the 12V power socket in the boot - Caterham have added a couple of cable-ties to the harness, but that's about all - I still don't understand why it failed IVA on this...

Anyway... Here are the scores on the doors: Total build time = 175 hours, which worked at as four months of weekends, approximately 32 days work of between 4 and 8 hours each. Not including waiting for Sean to send the missing parts....!

I thoroughly enjoyed the build process - there are still one or two minor jobs to be done, but I can't wait to spend a lot of the summer behind the wheel.