ARIEL’s ATOMS
In its all-new incarnation, the ultra-lightweight Ariel Atom moves the game on from generation three. Side-by-side with the 1995 prototype, well…
All-new Ariel Atom 4 meets Simon Saunders’ original Lightweight Sports Car
If other articles on the new Ariel Atom 4 show a journalist grinning from ear to ear as the force of the wind slicks back their hair Ray Reardon style, that is fake news. They are not grinning, they are grimacing. We could have cast the same illusion, but it is simply not how people use these cars in the real world, and 95% are apparently used on the road for the most part. Helmet-and-gloves is how to drive an Atom, especially on a chilly early winter morning in the West Country. In fact, while recounting terrifying tales of near-misses and bird-strikes – seriously – Ariel will not allow customers out in a demonstrator without such protection, so Octane opts to play by Ariel’s rules.
We become especially appreciative of this selfless dedication to truth when the first stones start to ping off the visor. That ping is not to be confused with the rather more metallic pinking of pebbles and gravel hitting the exposed chassis tubes and tub, giving you a unique sense of vulnerability as they ricochet around the car like bagatelle balls. Plus, of course, there is no heater and some idiot has left his thermals 135 miles away in London.
It’s starting to sound like quite a lot of sacrifice, isn’t it? Can it possibly be worth all that just to drive a car? Except the Atom isn’t really a car in the traditional manner: it is a sensory experience, the motoring equivalent of DurandDurand’s Excessive Machine. For two decades Ariel has been serving the narrowest of niches, creating pure driving machines for the most dedicated of motorists. And it is currently on the horns of the dilemma, unable to churn out vehicles in sufficient numbers to satisfy demand, but determined not to compromise its values: every car and bike is still handbuilt by one individual.
Ariel has come a long way. The name predates the internal combustion engine, manufacturing big-frontwheeled bicycles that you might incorrectly refer to as Penny Farthings (in a Hoovery way, Penny Farthing was simply the leading brand and became synonymous with the style, allegedly). With motorisation came trikes and then motorcycles, prompting Ariel to become a household name, not least for its Square Four and later V-twin.
After almost a century of the takeovers, bankruptcies, mergers and other machinations so typical of the British motor industry, the name fell dormant in the mid-60s. It was revived when it morphed out of Simon Saunders’ Automotive Dynamics in the late 1990s. Saunders, then a lecturer in transport design, and one of his students at Coventry University, Niki Smart, had set out to create a lightweight sports car – LSC – that would reinvent the Lotus/Caterham Seven in 1995. The pair begged and borrowed and fabricated to build their Ford-powered mid-engined two-seater in all its naked glory. They showed the car a year later and, while Smart went on to further studies and then into the industry – he is currently with GM in California – Saunders wasn’t finished with the Lightweight Sports Car and continued developing it, with more power. Thanks to the exoskeletal look of its chassis and basic shape, people tend to think little development was done from the Lightweight Sports Car, but Saunders stresses that the Atom was the same only in concept… as we’d find out when we drove the prototype. Which we can, thanks to Ariel putting it back on the road for the 20th anniversary of its conception in 2015.
‘In the 1980s I was messing about with modernising a Seven, but then I wondered what Colin Chapman would
make if he did a Seven now,’ says Saunders. ‘Well, it probably wouldn’t be a front-engined, rear-wheel-drive car. That started me thinking about what it should be.
‘I remember going to the Autosport Show and everyone was displaying cars with all the bodywork up so you could see what was going on underneath and that was much more interesting. It was quite disappointing when they put the bodies back on. Our car is essentially a working exploded drawing. Believe it or not, it is very conventional compared with some of the concepts we toyed with.’
Unlike the production Atom, which came on line at the turn of the millennium and started with a Rover K-series and over multiple generations worked its way all the way up to a mental John Hartley 3.0-litre V8 offering over 900bhp per ton, the LSC initially housed a 1.2-litre Fiesta engine before it was replaced with a 120bhp Puma unit.
You don’t worry about putting your feet on the seat when getting in, and scrabbling for the five-point harness in the tight cockpit can be a chore, but, once you are settled, it is easy to make yourself comfortable. Instrumentation is minimal and the driving position is, conveniently for me, short-legs-long-arms, the latter not for the steering wheel but for the faraway gearlever.
Fire it up and there is nothing to be afraid of; work through the gears and it is all rather pleasant except for the fact that even a short pilot is in the airstream a lot more than is comfortable. The small wheels and tyres feel distant but thanks to their visibility allow you to place the car with pinpoint accuracy. Or rather, they would. You see, the problem with this prototype is that it is so direct and feral. I have never experienced such direct steering except when guiding a soapbox with a piece of string stretched between two pram wheels as a kid.
Corrections are constant. Stop and count them, about five a second as every nuance in the road pitches the LSC this way and that. Camber can be a challenge, potholes and the like an outright threat as you learn to watch the wishbones to gauge how much trouble is coming your way through the rim. All of this is not exactly helped by the soft tyre compound, but driving this car has the thrills and intensity of a rollercoaster ride. Follow it from behind and it resembles a frenzied, speedball-fuelled Lunar Rover scuttling towards the horizon. Boot it from standstill and maintain acceleration on a rough road and… well, have you ever seen a cartoon of someone giving too much juice to an industrial floor polisher?
Driving the LSC is an intense – yet intensely rewarding – experience and can last as long as you can maintain the necessary 100% concentration. It is driving at its purest and that can be a little too pure for some. Yet in this uncompromised beast the seeds of the generation it spawned are glaringly obvious. It might have been the next development of the chassis upon which seven (ish) generations (or variations) of Atom were built, but without the LSC none of those serial 0-60-0 recordsetters would have existed.
As Saunders says: ‘There were three huge turning points for us. First the Honda engine replacing the
K-series – as a small manufacturer, you simply can’t have reliability issues but you need power and the Honda gave us that and buyers reassurance. Then the whole trackday thing took off. Finally, we got a superb review on Top
Gear; had it gone the other way it could have killed us off.’ Since then the company has thrived and now there is an all-new Atom, the 4. It might look familiar, but what has been carried over from the last incarnation of the Atom 3.5 can be counted on (and probably carried in) one hand. It was started four years ago, designed to be quicker and easier to build as well as to pass Euro and Australian small series type approval, which will save a heap of time and money, and the first cars should be delivered in the spring. The initial impression is that everything is more civilised. You sit lower and get less pummelled by the wind, the gearlever is nearer and beautifully weighted, as is the steering, which is more docile through the wheel. Can docile be better? In this case, definitely.
But the Atom 4 should not be judged against the LCS; its measure is the Atom 3.5 and it is still a huge leap forward. The tubes of the steel chassis – still supplied by Arch Motors in Huntingdon – are bigger, its wheels are wider, and its suspension has been redesigned from scratch (well, more rehung), and there’s anti-squat and -dive. Even the bodywork, what there is of it, is different.
The 4 weighs a tad more, but that is far from evident on the road, not least because the Civic 2.0-litre that Ariel used to supercharge has been supplanted by the 2.0-litre turbo from the Type R. The key stats are 320bhp at 6500rpm and 310lb ft down at 3000rpm. 0-60mph flashes up in under 3 seconds. But these are mere numbers. Start it with no throttle, to let the computers do whatever they do, then pull away gently, or just enjoy the LSD on the loose surface of the pub car park. There are three turbo settings on the all-new racing dashboard – if something the size of a letterbox can be called a dashboard. One is for everyday use (there is a more derogatory term that the factory uses), another is for scaring yourself, and a further one rearranges your internal organs.
But once you build speed, the dichotomy of this car soon becomes clear: it is insanely quick yet, all the time that you are enjoying what must equate to a £150,000200,000 driving experience for £40,000, the word that keeps springing to mind is refinement. Maybe only in comparison to previous Atoms, but…
It feels like there’s a fraction less power than the 3.5R, but a bucketload more torque. It’s so much smoother at any speed that driving is far easier throughout the revrange, and everything – handling, braking, steering, throttle – is simply superb, the absolute pinnacle of what any enthusiastic sports car driver could possibly demand. You would expect that, though. Indeed, while no-one would claim that it is the most practical thing on four wheels, what is most remarkable about the Atom 4 is not how well it goes quickly – they all do that – but how well it goes slowly. Perhaps even almost civilised enough to drive without a helmet…
Ping! Er, perhaps not.