‘You don’t just drive it, you harness its energy’
TVR CHIMAERA 500 MATT TOMKINS ENGINE 4997CC/V8/OHV GEARBOX 5-SPEED MANUAL POWER 340BHP@5500RPM TORQUE 350LB FT@3750RPM TOP SPEED 167MPH 0-60MPH 4.1 SEC FUEL ECONOMY 15MPG
Spitting, snarling, ready to bite and with plastic skin draped over a tubular chassis… sound familiar? Lightweight construction and 340bhp combine to make a machine in need of serious taming, especially in damp conditions. This fruity Chimaera 500’s 4.1 second 0-60 time beats the Testarossa hands down, while even the lowliest of its siblings, the Griffith 400 will keep up with the Ferrari to sixty. OK, so past that Marinello’s masterpiece will leave it for dust, but it’s that bottom, usable part of the graph that really matters on the road, isn’t it?
That and the sheer involvement you, the driver, play behind the wheel of this absolutely extraordinary driver's car.
You don’t just drive this thing, you harness its energy, you dance with it, attempt to tame it. Squeeze the pedal and with a hair-curling bark from the exhaust you’re pushed back in your seat, that Buick-derived 5-litre Rover V8 power plant urging the car forth. But don’t you dare let your concentration wain for even a second. It’s lively and raw and waiting to bite back, especially on the greasy, damp tarmac we’ve got today, as I chase the camera car up the road before squeezing the throttle and unleashing just a fraction of the beast's potential on a scintillating return run.
Grease and farm mud make this the wrong moment to push the limits of David Massey's pride and joy, but tame it, on a dry day, and you’ll have
some of the best driving experiences of your life. It’s a visceral experience that truly puts you in direct contact with the road beneath you, in one of the most fabulously driver-focussed cabins out there. As you approach, the uninterrupted haunches fade into the sculpted door skins, a hidden electronic door release on the bottom of the Citroën Cx-derived door mirror the only means of entry. Leather aplenty awaits you, as do gauges and buttons scattered seemingly randomly across the walnut dash. It’s here where the ‘factory-built kit car’ adage comes to mind, though I perhaps prefer ‘hand-made’ and 'low-volume'. That does it more credit. Steering is heavy at low speed, though you become grateful for the reason, the quickness of the rack, out on the road. Also somewhat of a workout is the action of the fivespeed manual ‘box that takes some considerable effort to get into gear, but such is the effortless torque there’s little need to chase the cogs once you’re up to speed on the open road.
We’re in the top of the tree 500 here, values of which are strong, pushing upwards of 20 grand – but 4 and 4.3-litre examples can be had for little over half that. Good news for those of us with champagne taste and beer money. If you are tempted to buy, check the glassfibre body carefully for signs of accident damage and poor repairs. Blisters in the paint aren’t ‘osmosis’ as some may have you believe, but a consequence of moisture trapped beneath the paint. The only answer is to have the area stripped back and repaired properly, a costly process. The tubular chassis can rot, outriggers in particular, so take your overalls and grovel carefully. Look, too, for signs of overheating, pressurising and head gasket failure.
A fix within reach, of course, of the
DIYER, but not something you want to discover on your drive home…
Sorry, but you’ve all missed the point. Outright speed isn’t the be all and end all of the Ferrari Testarossa’s existence. Rather, it’s the engineering its design draws upon. The raison d’etre of Ferrari supercars has always been to bring the Formula One experience to the road. In giving the F1-derived flat-12 a pair of small radiators rather than one big one, and relocating them either side of the car, Ferrari finally built a road car to the principles of the groundbreaking Lotus Type 72 F1 car and its decendents and imitators.
Yes, this means the Testarossa’s road footprint is almost ludicrously enormous, but it also means that the design can include F1-style super-wide tyres at the rear, combined with surprisingly narrow ones at the front. The result is massive grip to harness 385bhp, combined with wonderful tactility at the wheel. It’s security you can exploit – and it’s all analogue.
By contrast, the XKR and GTO are fast but uninvolving, their handling taken care of by electronics. The Chimaera is similarly analogue, but fundamentally traditional, more like a Fifties sports-racer than a Seventies F1 car. The Impreza is competition-bred, but it’s a rally car, not F1inspired, so it’s optimised for rapid off-the-line launches and loose-surface grip. And of course none of these cars are mid-engined.
And none influenced car styling for a generation either. Within a few years everyone was copying the Testarossa’s side-strakes, including the Mitsubishi GTO… I can also add that, in terms of driving style, dynamics, road manners etc, the closest experience to the Testarossa driving experience on a real-world budget is probably the Toyota MR2 MKII. The Turbo version does 0-60 in 6.2sec and has a top speed of 155mph – a fair way off the Testarossa’s 5.2 and 180, but the actual driving experiences are genuinely comparable. ■