Mach Seven

Low-flying highs await MATT PRIOR as he drives a rare £80,000 Caterham from Dartford to Mach Valley in Wales

I don't have accurate statistics because none will exist, but bear with.

I think anecdotally it's acknowledged that more than a few pilots subsequently become Caterham drivers, and/or that flying is something many Caterham owners turn to. There's something that unites the activities: mechanical interaction, guiding something analogue, feeling the elements, managing mild perils. The Seven club magazine is even called Lowflying.

Where better, then, to take a new Caterham than to what has sort of become the glamorous home of low flying in the UK: a set of valleys in Wales colloquially known as the Mach Loop, named after the nearby town of Machynlleth, where British military flyers and their friends practise screeching between the hills.

If this sounds to you like an excuse for machine-mad photographer Jack Harrison and me to stand on a windswept mountainside in the hope of seeing an F-22 scream just a few hundred feet past us then, well... rumbled, I suppose.

But what better Caterham to get there in than this one? It's a CSR, which was a new dawn for the Kent firm when it first appeared 20 years ago.

Wider than a standard Seven, it was a bigger, smoother-riding, more capable and plusher Seven, with a marginally more comfortable interior. Faster and yet at the same time more relaxed. Better for zooming through the valleys than the harsher-riding Caterhams of old.

I can't remember the last time I saw one. And if you're a Caterham fetishist like me, you'll know one if you see it.

A standard Caterham Seven, by which I mean one from the regular range (not the kei car-compliant 170), is 3180mm long by 1470mm wide. You can optionally 'large-chassis' a regular Seven for more room, which takes it out to the size of this CSR, 3360mm long by 1700mm wide, but the CSR has details that make it look different again.