The new Caterham.

It's called the SP300R and has been designed to rival the Radical.

The idea is that people have got bored of their Porsches, Ferrari's and Lamborghini's as they have hit the performance barrier of such machines. See these cars are all very good and very fast but they are designed, even as an afterthought, for the road. They aren't designed to be the fastest machine on four wheels. This always holds them back. The extra weight they carry in luxuries for those that can't live without and road tyres. Road tyres aren't as grippy as slicks because they have grooves cut into them to disperse water. I'm stating the obvious here but the reason I'm doing so is to hammer the point home that these machines aren't but solely for speed, a fact that many people seem to forget.

The new Caterham is built for speed. Let's start with the engine. It's a supercharged 2.0l Ford duractec unit which produces no less than 300bhp. This is not uncommon for track day cars, to have a small engine that's ultra responsive. If you think it's inadequate then you need to remember that F1 engines are only 2.5 litres. OK I'll admit to not knowing how fast it'll take to do 60 but I do know it's top speed is around 155mph, at which point it'll be producing 450kgs of downforce.

That isn't bad and when you consider it only weighs 550kgs standing still you soon get an idea of how it might be through the corners. Fantastic. The steering is responsive, it grips and doesn't give you much reason to lose confidence. Obviously without traction control you can't just dump full throttle in the middle of the corner or you'll spin and look silly. That said it does have some very good traction.

It also looks the business and if you've ever seen a Radical, all you have to do is imagine one of those in the Caterham F1 colours and you'll have a perfect mental image. There is a slight admission though. The options list. The options are as follows, what colour you want it and whether or not you want a passengers seat. Would you like to guess how much it costs for this lack of anything, including road legality? £81,000. I can't lie to you, that's a lot of money. The similarly priced BAC Mono can go on the road for instance so has a major extra string to its bow than the SP300R.

Even so it is a good machine to have in your garage and would I recommend you do? No, I'd recommend you get the Radical, or the BAC. Goodbye.