Release The Beast!
Sixties TVR Tuscans were tiny and packed US V8 muscle, so their heftier Nineties six-pot namesake must be a bit of a pussycat, right? We drive one to find out…
TVR Tuscan at 20
Rear-drive supercars aside, very few real-world cars are genuinely intimidating. Fewer still consciously use that fear-factor as a marketing tool. TVR’s Peter Wheeler, however, wasn’t one for sticking to the rules because he oversaw a succession of sports cars during the Nineties and Noughties that sprouted exhausts aimed at pedestrians, wings that looked like someone had taken an axe to them and splitters garnished – so the legend goes – with dog bites.
Even the names were rooted in the best traditions of mythological nightmares – monikers like Cerbera, Chimaera, Typhon, Tamora, and Sagaris. They looked like nothing else and – certainly in the case of the Griffith – rewarded anything other than complete driver respect with instant departure – backwards, in a cloud of tyre smoke – from the Queen’s highways. To paraphrase MG – your mother wouldn’t like them.
On the face of it, the 2000-on Tuscan looks pretty much like business as usual – glaring insectile front, complete with a bonnet so deeply sculpted that it looks like a giant has sat on it, curiously denuded rear end, twin exhausts that could only have come from an armaments factory and a cabin design that frankly defies description. Not that any of this would have bothered the lucky few who slapped down a deposit back in 1997 on what they thought was going to be the Griffith Speed Six – in essence a standard Griff’ with myriad body tweaks and TVR’s own four-litre engine under the bonnet – mind.
Then Wheeler decided that he wanted his new car to be more than the usual fair-weather weekend toy – a car that could, in fact, be used every day.
The resultant Tuscan was a very different animal; the ride from the modified chassis was less hardcore and the body, with its Surrey Top-esque profile, less shouty roadster and more civilised GT.
It was priced – at just under £40,000 – to rival the BMW M Roadster, Porsche Boxster S and MercedesBenz SLK, but it didn’t take long for breathless period road testers to start comparing it to the likes of the Ferrari 360 Modena and Porsche 911 GT3.
It was no surprise, then, that 1300 people immediately placed a deposit when TVR unveiled the prototype road car at the 1998 British Motor Show. Those people would then need to wait another two years – 20 years ago this year, in fact – before Blackpool finally began delivering cars to their wideeyed customers.
It was worth the wait, though…
QUALITY COUNTS
Once your eyes and brain have made the necessary mental adjustment to fully drink in the Tuscan’s jawdropping appearance, your first impression is of a car that, perhaps surprisingly for a TVR, oozes quality engineering. The door that pops open when you press the button release under the door mirror feels heavy and closes behind you with a hefty thud.
This is a car that you very much sit in, not on – the driving position leaves your backside seemingly millimetres from the road and you’re enveloped – cocooned, even – in an organic riot of outrageous swoops and curves swathed in luscious leather and garnished with beautiful brass knobs and turn-dials for such functions as the heater, blower and lights.
Enough prevarication – time to poke the beast with a sharp stick and see what’s what. Turning the key elicits a high-pitched whinny then a burst of noise that CAR magazine described, back in the day, as ‘a nice chattery, poppy idle, like some breathed-on old Jag. A certain volume of sound… but it won’t frighten the horses’.
The controls won’t frighten the driver, either, because Peter Wheeler clearly wasn’t joking when he said that he wanted this to be a car that you could drive every day. The steering has power assistance, the clutch doesn’t feel like it’s set in concrete and while it’s best practice to briefly select second gear before first at rest, the gearbox itself feels pleasingly hefty rather than obstructively truculent.
EXPLOSIVE INSANITY
The Tuscan shuffles and jiggles as we bimble out of our appallingly metalled car park base camp, but despatches a speed bump with ease. Then we’re out on the open – and, it must be said, rather damp – road, suddenly very much aware of this car’s 360bhp per tonne, ability to hit 100mph from rest in a touch over nine seconds and 180mph terminal velocity. That, and the conspicuous absence of ABS brakes or traction control.
The power and torque curves may be reassuringly smooth and the throttle travel long and measured, but both period road testers and this very car’s owner – who is currently sitting, looking rather pale, in the passenger seat – talk of wheelspin in the wet above 70mph should the driver get over-confident with the loud pedal.
There’ll be no such antics today. Following a couple of familiarisation runs up and down the road, we suddenly find ourselves in sole possession of it. Well, it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it?
V8 TVRs are usually big on torque and low on revs, but this six-pot is the complete opposite – peak torque and power don’t arrive until 5250rpm and 7000rpm respectively – so you really have to be committed if you want the full blood-and-thunder experience.
We’re probably only going around six-tenths today, but it’s still a shattering sensation. Floor it in second or third gear and it’s almost as though a tightly-strung bungee cord connecting the car to the horizon has suddenly snapped and the engine’s bass rumble morphs into a howl as the revs soar.
CAR magazine’s early Tuscan road test described it as ‘a strangely paradoxical melding of full control and explosive insanity’.
Suddenly, those Ferrari and Porsche comparisons don’t seem quite so farfetched after all.
GIVE AND TAKE
Those Ferraris and Porsches may well be easier and faster on the trickier elements of this road today, but the work that went into making the Tuscan a more compliant companion than previous TVRs is clear to see, with the super-direct steering melding with a surprising amount of give – occasionally even, dare we say it, a touch of roll – in the ride and handling.
We never once break traction, but period tests report that grip in the dry is colossal and you don’t have to be Ken Block to catch a slide in the damp. This is a sports car, then, but with a healthy dose of GT DNA.
WORK FOR IT
Compromise is rarely viewed as a good thing – it smacks of something not being quite as good as it could or should be – but not for the first time, TVR managed to turn a negative into a positive with the Tuscan. It may have sacrificed some of the old Griffith’s swivel-eyed lunacy for a touch more refinement, and the driver has to work for what lunacy there is, but the result is a much more broadly talented and far less binary car.
As racer and roadtester, Mark Hales, wrote of it back in October 2000: ‘It may not be perfect, but it sure is exciting.’
Massive exhausts deliver a spine-tingling soundtrack.
‘The bonnet is so deeply sculpted that it looks like a giant has sat on it’