Caterham Tuning Tips and Modifications

Maximise your Caterhams driving pleasure

Caterham car tuning tips and advice. We have a wide range of tuning articles covering all models of Caterham from small classic Caterhams, bike engines models right up to track day set up race spec models. Following our tuning tips you will avoid many of the common mistakes and actually achieve the car setup you desire. Please join the forum for model specific questions and answers and to meet other owners and see what modifications they have done.

TorqueCars started providing Caterham modification help, car track day setup and car tweak suggestions and advice and tips back in 2003 and have grown from strength to strength with a fast growing membership of all types of cars including many, Caterham owners. We are currently one of the fastest growing car tuning clubs around and certainly one of the friendliest. In 2007 we also organised our first full car show.

Our Caterham comprehensive modification articles on tuning and styling are kept upto date so for the very latest Caterham modification,track day setup and tweak suggestions and advice, tips and pointers please check back regularly – we aim to cover in more detail the superlight, R300,R400 and R500 which are already great track day cars and not very expensive to run and the latest evolution of the Caterham – the CSR and SP/300R. We strongly recommend that you join our Caterham forums and swap modification ideas with like minded Caterham owners in the modification forums.

If you have a Caterham project underway we would love to hear about it, the Gallery section in the forum contains some interesting projects. Scroll down the page to see our latest tuning articles for your Caterham.

Lightening the flywheel – the flywheel works in a similar way to the wheel in the toy cars you used to rev up and release and let it zoom off. The heavy wheel located between the engine and the gearbox builds up rotational force with speed and momentum.

Effectively storing the energy and helping the car resist changes in engine speed – good for cruising at a steady speed but bad when you need a fast engine response.

Customizing cars, here you can find out how to customize a car in our simple to follow guide with tips and hints and in depth car customization articles.

One popular modification done to cars is replacing the wheels. We will look at the types of wheel available, the pros and cons of each and look at the implications of fitting different size wheels.

We will be challenging the concept of wider wheels giving more grip and looking at the effect a larger rim size has on a cars performance.

Superchargers offer the promise of substantial power gains with very few drawbacks. So lets look at the growing popularity of supercharger kits and see what its all about.

A supercharger is quite simply an air compressor which helps push more air into an engine. These are driven by a belt from the engine effectively creating pull on the engine sapping up to 30% of the engines power.

Todays featured car tuning articles

This phenomenon known as brake fade can be quite unexpected and lethal and I would hazard a guess that 1 in 4 cars are likely to experience brake fade to some degree. Brake fade manifests itself by a spongy feel on the pedal and little or no braking force. Do not confuse brake fade with bad brakes or a mechanical fault as it applies to brake systems in relatively good condition.

We look at how to build a twincharger setup for your car and discuss the various twincharger configurations and their performance advantages with twin turbos, supercharger or one of each.

Twincharging provides a relatively low cost way to get the best from a supercharger and turbo providing large power gains through the whole RPM band.

We look at what it takes to build a 10 second car and examine the power and weight requirements to reach the sub 11 second goal on the drag strip.

Follow our tips and you can make a 10 second car quite cheaply and within your budget with some power mods and serious weight reduction.