New Caterham factory: Inside where Britain's favourite track car is built
Caterham has long built addictive cars for dedicated road and track drivers. Now at its new Dartford facility, it's building them better and faster.
Caterham has a new home, not far from its old one but spectacularly different. The old factory, on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Dartford, Kent, was where Caterhams were built for 40 years, a low-rise collection of eventually four units that looked a bit run down when I first visited back in the early ’90s. Caterham’s new home is in a 54,000 sq ft unit – with another 30,000 sq ft of mezzanine – less than a mile from the Dartford Crossing and just a couple of miles from the old Kennet Road factory to help retain as many of the workforce as possible.
Bicester and Silverstone were floated as potential sites but CEO Bob Laishley reckons they’d have lost a number of employees and about six months’ production while hiring and training replacements. VT Holdings, the Japanese owner of Caterham since 2021, has invested £3.5m to convert the building, originally a warehouse, into the sports car maker’s new home, and very impressive it is too.
In fact, for the first time ever, you can take a tour of Caterham’s production facilities. ‘We started offering factory tours in August/September, on Fridays, 16 places, two and a half hours, £30 a pop,’ says Laishley. ‘We released dates up to Christmas and they sold out in a week.’ Dates for the first quarter of 2025 have proved similarly popular.
There’s a motorsport theme to the building, encapsulated in the illustration of the route of the factory tour, which looks like a circuit layout and has features such as Race Control (the offices), Hospitality (the canteen) and Scrutineering (quality control).
There have been some changes to the way Caterham does business, too. It no longer retails cars, leaving that to its five UK dealers, and it will also no longer field cars in its race championships. Instead, it will concentrate on production, bringing down build times to raise production from around 500 cars a year to as many as 750. Laishley says the demand is there, citing a steady stream of enquiries from people around the world wanting to become Caterham dealers.
Presented with a clean sheet, they have stuck with the ‘one man, one car’ production system. A production line wouldn’t have worked, explains Laishley, because the cars vary greatly in complexity and the line would move as slowly as the most complex car. So the shop floor is laid out with 33 individual bays with a spine behind each run housing tool chests and all the services, such as power, air lines and exhaust extraction, that might normally hang down from the ceiling.
Among the cars in build during our visit is a Seven CSR, the wide-chassis model with independent rear suspension and inboard front spring/damper units. ‘We’ve recently reintroduced the CSR,’ says Laishley. ‘We haven’t sold one in the UK for 10 years and nobody could tell me why, so to celebrate its 20th anniversary we’re building a limited edition of 20 called the CSR Twenty with an interior at the luxury end of what we can offer.’
Project V, Caterham’s impressive EV concept, does not have a place here. Development is now with Tokyo R&D in Japan, Yamaha has been announced as the e-axle supplier and VT is still seeking funding, which would see it built in its own factory. Here in the UK, Laishley had hoped by now to be able to demonstrate the potential of the electrified Seven, which we reported on in issue 312, to show Caterham and electrification could work.
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A more immediate challenge is securing reliable and long-range supplies of internal combustion engines. ‘We’ve spoken to five different manufacturers who are building ICE engines well into the next decade,’ says Laishley, ‘and the challenge is finding something that fits.’
The other looming issue is tyres. Caterham had a long and fruitful relationship with Avon, but last year Avon’s parent company Goodyear decided to end production and close the factory. Caterham was grateful to strike a deal with Toyo, which offered a similar range, from its track-ready Proxes R888R to its more humble, everyday patterns. However, the Japanese tyre maker is planning to drop a couple of the sizes that Caterham uses because the general trend is for bigger fitments, meaning there’s dwindling demand for these smaller sizes.
As well as having two paint booths turning out high-quality work, another innovation at the new facility is that finished cars can be driven onto curtain-sided delivery trucks backed up to the building.
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‘Inevitably, at the end of the tour you exit through the gift shop’, jokes Laishley. It’s a room on the mezzanine that does indeed offer some merch (and a great view of the factory) but which will be developed into a space where customers can come to spec their cars, something you couldn’t do at the old home. Caterham may have only moved down the road but it’s come along way in doing so.
