21 Days in a Lotus 7 - Kit Car Road Trip

Editor's note: Anyone who has driven across the United States can tell you it is a big, beautiful country out there. Even those who have done the trip dozens of times cannot come away jaded once they've traveled through states like Montana, Colorado, and Arizona, no matter how many times they've done it.

It seems that no matter where you hail from, the view through the windshield can be awe-inspiring. So what would happen if you were to take a group of folks who live half a world away, drop them in Texas with their right-hand-drive Lotus 7-based kits, point them toward San Francisco, and give them 21 days to get there?

That was the concept behind a U.S. tour for 50 or so kit owners who live mostly in England but have traveled all over the European continent. The following is Ian Brandon's take on seeing the U.S. for the first time-and from behind the wheel of his kit car.

It has been noted that England and America are not only separated by an ocean but also by a common language, so be sure to convert wings to fenders, lorry to truck, car park to parking structure, and lay by to rest stop-and the way those blokes spell everything else was left in for flavour.

For an extended look at the tour, with many more photos and insights, check out Mitch Leben's Web blog at www.usatour05.blogspot.com.

Who are we?
We are Ian and Anita Brandon from Jersey (that's Old Jersey), an island of only 45 square miles, some 120 miles south of mainland England. Just how different will we find American roads from our very narrow lanes with a top speed limit of 40 mph?

What's the car?
It's a '01 Caterham 7. Almost every Caterham is different in some way, but this one has an all-aluminium, 1.8 MG Rover K-series engine with some light tuning to give approximately 175 bhp. It also has a six-speed close-ratio box, limited-slip differential, and fully adjustable dampers. The body is aluminium and the wings and nose are fibreglass, with a total weight of about 1,250 pounds.

What y'all doing in the US of A?
Sevens Tours is a loose group of enthusiasts who communicate by e-mail and occasionally get together for a tour somewhere. In the past they have been to Ireland, Scotland, Finland, and Italy. America has been discussed before but fell down because the shipping was just too difficult. Then up popped a guy named Steve Blair (a Texan living in London) as the catalyst that made it happen. And all because he had a burning ambition to drive one top-of-the-Rockies road in Colorado he had been along on family holidays long gone. So the aim was to travel 3,400 miles from Houston to San Francisco via the best roads (with bendy bits) in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. Our happy band consisted of approximately 50 Caterhams, 6 Westfields, 6 Birkins, 3 original Lotus, 2 Ultralites, a Robin Hood, and, of course, our ever-present guardians-the support trucks.

DAY 1
Day one was relatively uneventful after day zero, which saw us have an accident on the way to the airport in Jersey, get delayed by fog, and suffer an aborted take-off due to an open door. After that, the 10-hour flight from London to Houston was a breeze. On arrival in Houston we got on a bus to the warehouse where the advance party had put our cars (which had all been started and had $10 of fuel added).

Apparently Houston was unseasonably hot, and I think we wondered why they had chosen a disused oven to park the cars -a regular sauna. We were told we had a short drive "down the road" to our hotel in Seabrook and that we would travel in groups of about eight cars behind someone who knew the way. Well, this little jaunt turned out to be 52 miles, which coincided with the beginning of the rush hour, and I am now able to identify it as one of the most difficult bits of the whole trip.

I was coming to terms with cars passing on both sides (a no-no anywhere in Europe), but what I hadn't expected were some of the worst road surfaces we came across in the whole trip (outside the Navajo reservation in Monument Valley) and the tyre carcasses strewn everywhere. It's one thing to hit one of these in a pickup (why does everyone have a pickup?), but quite another in a Caterham. I've always felt I'm a better driver with my head still attached to my neck, but instant decapitation looked a strong possibility from where I was sitting if one of these old tyres was sent flying in our direction. And then, of course, there were all the other bits of bumper, trim, and hubcap, just to keep you alert. The temperature and humidity were about in the mid-'90s, and trying to stay in convoy (no route book at this stage) was really a bit of a strain. This was at least partially compensated for by the looks we got from passing traffic, with all sorts of people hanging out of windows waving cameras at our unlikely, multi-coloured convoy. Anyway, we arrived at our hotel where a section of the car park was cordoned off for us. The tape was strategically placed about 4 feet off the ground, which-much to the amusement of the local Highway Patrolman-allowed us to simply drive straight underneath! First U.S. illusion shattered when this gentleman was not sitting in his patrol car with a doughnut and a coffee like in all the best cop shows (although he looked like he might have done that in the past).

Our group drove down to the harbour at Seabrook to get something to eat and, unfortunately (and not for the last time), set off several car alarms in the car park courtesy of a little over-enthusiasm with the throttle peddle. One old gentleman (with a badge) was not amused and decided to give one of the Americans who had now joined us a roasting for his driving in the car park. His only crime was driving a yellow car, the same colour as the real culprit's. Little did we know that less than a week later Hurricane Rita would see Seabrook (including our hotel, which we saw on the news) evacuated.

DAY 2
By 8 a.m. it's already hot in Seabrook, and it took several attempts at the optimum way of packing our very limited luggage (one holdall, two bike panniers, and a laptop backpack). As we set off on our adventure, the first thing that struck us about the area south of Houston was that it must be the traffic-light centre of the Western World. We lost count at about 25 (all red naturally), which made for slow progress, but did give time to admire a couple of great shop names like The Shoe Hospital and The Stove Hospital. About 50 miles along the freeway, a fire truck passed us and pointed at the rear of the car. We slowed down and then heard the sound of our luggage rack and one of our bags dragging along the road attached by a single elastic strap. A lug had sheared off the rack (overloaded!) and our careful packing was abandoned for a bag strapped onto the rollbar and complete loss of rear vision.

The hard shoulder was a worrying place to be with huge trucks rumbling past just a couple of feet away. It also looked like a war zone, with craters and bits of vehicle everywhere, making for a scary, and of course blind, takeoff. It would be about an hour later that we suddenly saw the mother of all showers approaching, and the hood was now buried under the hastily repacked luggage. Eventually reduced to crawling along at 20 mph by the complete lack of visibility, we pulled up off the road (for fear of being flattened by some truck travelling at barely diminished speed), only to find that our safe haven was in fact an unguarded railway embankment-Doh! It soon dried up and as we pulled into the outskirts of Austin, a roadside thermometer read 98.7 degrees. and we kind of understood why we had consumed about 3 gallons of water that day.

DAY 3 - AUSTIN
We had advanced warning from the locals that the 6th Street area of Austin had had an influx of New Orleans refugees. You can imagine this is something of a novelty coming from a place like Jersey, but slightly disappointingly we didn't spot anything untoward. Went to an Irish pub and met up with the local Lotus owners club, who put us in touch with the Austin Lotus agent, Autostrada on North Lamarr. They were incredibly helpful and on a Saturday took me to The Muffin Shop, which specialises in exhausts but seemed well able to weld up my luggage rack. They also gave me a brilliant T-shirt with the slogan "no muff too tough" (which has a whole other meaning on this side of the Atlantic).

It was barely two hours later, when we ventured out to the local Walmart, that we got the unexpected chance to test The Muffin Shop's welding. We were the third car travelling in a convoy of five when a boy racer jumped in behind us. Waiting behind me at a stop line he went and we didn't-crunch! He disappeared in a cloud of tyre smoke and my newly welded luggage rack was again looking a bit bent, as was the spare wheel, but fortunately it seemed as if there was no suspension or panel damage, and most importantly, the fuel tank which sits in the rear had not split.