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If you can engineer it, why not build it?
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Films:
1964 Lotus Super Seven: A Lightweight Legacy
Lovely little film. Iconic car, and a knowledgeable owner. These are always my favorites. “Any suspension will work if you don’t let it.” is a favorite axiom attributed to Chapman. Blundell & Harty make reference to it in “A Multibody Systems Approach to Vehicle Dynamics”, Of course, Chapman was referring to over damped systems with excessive spring rates. When a car is as light as a Seven the suspension has to be correspondingly supple.
This whole group of cars is quite interesting and is very much alive. What about some others from this group, Petrolicious. It would be interesting to hear from Exomotive about their Exocet. Keith Tanner, an engineer / designer / tuner at Flyin’ Miata in Colorado is expert with these cars. Some do 0-60 in 4 seconds. And there is the Westfield. The Catherham is well known. By dropping the weight of a car below 1,500 pounds / 700 kilograms interesting things start to happen. This is as true now as it was when the 7 was first built.
You could buy the 7 as kit, from Lotus, year ago. Apparently there was a significant reduction in tax if you bought your car as a box of parts. My recollection is that the tax applied if the box of parts contained assembly instructions, but not otherwise. Apparently Lotus provided ‘disassembly instructions’ would could be followed in reverse.
Here is one of the many accounts of that:
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-1963-lotus-super-7-came-with-disassembly-instructions/
