cars news 10: We Strap into Another Obscure—and Insane

-It sometimes feels as if most of the British economy is based on the production of oddball sportscars. These can be divided into two categories, those that have been designed to deliver thrills at relatively modest cost, and those that combine the lightest possible structure with an engine powerful enough to allow them to outperform bona fide supercars. The Elemental RP1, which you have almost certainly never heard of until now, definitely falls into the second category.

The obscurity is understandable – at the moment there’s only one RP1, the prototype that you see here. It’s being produced by a team including a former senior McLaren engineer and has the sort of power to weight ratio that’s normally the preserve of rocket propelled ordinance, so we were delighted to be invited to have a go in it.

The go in question happened at a place called Longcross, about 20 miles south west of London, which is a former military testing site. This is where the British army invented reactive armor, the sort that explodes when hit, and since they abandoned it it’s become a popular place for filming stunt sequences for big movies. By our reckoning it’s also the closest place to central London without speed limits. Although the prototype RP1 is street legal, it’s definitely been designed for life on the track, so this seems an excellent place to make first acquaintance.

There’s no doubting the RP1 is a hard-working prototype, as its battered bodywork bears testament to the year its spent as a development hack. The edgy design is slightly reminiscent of the KTM X-Bow and even more so of a sports-prototype racer shorn of its wings. It’s built around a central carbon-fiber tub with steel subframes at both ends carrying the control-arm suspension and—at the back—the engine and transmission. Total weight is 1435 pounds, with the plan being to cut that to around 1300 pounds on the production version.

The prototype Elemental has a 2.0-liter Ford Ecoboost four-cylinder engine that’s been tuned to produce 320 horespower, and which drives the rear wheels via a race-spec Hewland sequential transmission. Buyers will also get the option to substitute a 1.0-liter two-cylinder Ecoboost, which will allow the Elemental to compete in various UK race championships without carrying any penalty weight.

On the Track

There’s an element of uncertainty when it comes to driving any new car for the first time, especially one produced by a brand new company and with a power-to-weight ratio similar to that of a McLaren 675LT. It could be a dynamic revelation, or it could be a widowmaker, hungry for its first victim.

Just getting in makes you feel like a racer, standing on the seat and then sliding under the steering wheel. The seats are angled to lift your thighs higher than your hips, but within a few minutes the heels-raised driving position feels completely familiar. A button starts the engine, which fires into a loud, buzzy idle. There’s a clutch pedal for low speed maneuvering; beyond that the gearbox is pure sequential, controlled by paddles behind the steering wheel.

The highly tuned Ecoboost feels lumpy at low speeds, but on the track it quickly clears its throat and starts to pull very hard, sending an exciting thrill of vibration through the driver’s seat. As in its more workaday applications this engine isn’t a high-revving screamer—the redline is set at a relatively modest 7000 rpm—but it has serious torque pretty much all the way across the rev band. The transmission is very impressive, delivering its seamless upshifts as quickly as you can pull the right-hand paddle. It’s seriously quick, although no faster in a straight line than something like an Ariel Atom 3.5R.

Corners deliver the big revelation. The Elemental has already hinted at its party trick before the first turn, its unassisted steering getting noticeably heavier as we get past 60 mph and aerodynamic downforce starts to do its thing. But pointing the nose towards the first apex reveals that the chassis is generating vastly more adhesion than you would expect, serious mechanical grip augmented by the hand of God as the diffuser sucks the RP1 downwards.

Longcross includes a section known as The Snake, a sequence of fast turns over crests that was presumably built so as to establish how the Centurion tank handled on the limit (and which was also used as the road to Michael Caine’s house in Children of Men). It’s a stern test for any car, and one that becomes outright terrifying in some performance machinery—many a British road tester has a story about walking way from some smoking wreckage hereabouts. The Elemental pretty much shrugs it off, carrying insane speed through the whole series from start to finish. It’s traveling so quickly it actually takes off on the biggest crest.

The problem is likely to be weakling drivers struggling with the steering loads and the need to muscle the car through longer turns. Longcross is mostly corner, so it soon gets tiring to physically keep it on track. And it’s not just aero: the RP1 has traction control, but even deliberate abuse on Longcross’s slowest turn didn’t reveal its presence—it just sticks and goes. It’s one of those rare cars that comes close to having too much adhesion, although the novelty of being able to outpace pretty much anything else on track would take a long time to wear thin.

Elemental has barely gotten started in Europe, so its not surprising that there are no plans to bring the RP1 to the States. They should certainly consider it, even with the £75,500 ($115,000) price tag; on first acquaintance this seems like almost the perfect vehicle for side-by-side racetrack instruction. We wish the team every success, as the old song says, There Will Always Be An England, and most of it will be building lightweight sports cars.

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from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1isK6fo

We Strap into Another Obscure—and Insane—British Sports Car

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