The ordering process

So the morning after the night before (well the day after that, but still sounds good) I logged onto the Caterham website, downloaded the price list and put the call into Caterham South, spoke to the receptionist, but she said "there wasn't a sales rep available to take my call!" Having heard a little bit in the past of a mildly blasé attitude from Caterham I thought to call the midlands branch to see if anyone wanted my business.... It turns out that I ended up speaking to Doug Parker, who at the time was fairly new there and he commutes about 1 mile from where I live all the way up to Leicester every day - which is a pretty mean feat...

Speccing
After the initial discussion with Doug, I specced myself up a nice R300 with a few goodies, however my mate with the R300 suggested he'd much rather have an R400 if he got another Caterham as the R300 engine is a touch on the 'slow side' down the straights on tracks.... So I quickly realised I may aswell go for the R400 and get the goodies I mentioned above included in the price... It didn't end there though...   

So once in the R400 'column' on the price list I added a few more 'goodies' and thought that it was now getting quite close to an R500 price, and for the difference I really couldn't resist the R500 

Gave Doug a call as on a previous conversation he said I couldn't get the R500 in kit form, so I'd have to go with the R400 (which wasn't quite what I wanted) something to do with the fact there isn't a build manual for the R500 and the last person that built an R500 had issues with the oil pressure and throttle body configuration (not his fault) and it all got a bit messy for Caterham..!

Nevertheless, not one to take 'no you can't have that one' too easily, I pushed Doug and he spoke to someone back at HQ.  He then came back to me and said it was OK to get the R500 (manual box) in kit form, so long as I signed a disclaimer, knew that the instruction manual would only be for an R400, and that Caterham wanted to setup the throttle bodies.... I was very happy with that, so was just a case of deciding what colour to go for, and what to do for the next 5 months until the bits arrived!  

Well I've watched this video plenty of times...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mg_9GrHQgY