CASSUTT SPECIAL

£20,000

Now, this little machine really is mind-blowing. It’s called the Cassutt Special and it was originally designed back in 1951 by TWA airline pilot Tom Cassutt, specifically for air racing. The tiny fuselage is a steel tube spaceframe wrapped in fabric, while the wings are all wood with spruce spars and ribs with plywood skins. It’s powered by a Continental 0-200, which is a 200-cubic-inch – that’s 3.3 litres – flat-four air-cooled engine driving a fixed-pitch wooden propeller.

That simple engine produces a modest 100bhp, so it just qualifies the Cassutt for our group. Empty, the aircraft weighs only 276kg. Now to the performance. Ready? This bijou craft will cruise straight and level at 180mph and has a VNE (velocity never exceed) of 248mph. That’s what 100bhp can do for you if you have a low-drag airframe and low weight. Amazing, isn’t it?

If you suffer from claustrophobia, then you won’t like the Cassutt Special. The cockpit is tiny and the old cliché that you ‘wear it’ is almost true. It’s a straightforward aeroplane to fly but it’s the landing that’s not so easy. The snag is that you have to fly the final approach at 100mph, which is faster than most light aircraft and even a Spitfire.

The Cassutt Special has been hugely successful in the famous Reno air races in Nevada and is used today in the rejuvenated F1 air racing championship. If you own a racing car, even if it’s road-legal like a D-type Jaguar, you need to take it onto a track to properly enjoy it. You don’t need to do the same with a machine like the Cassutt. It is fully aerobatic, so you can loop and roll it on a sunny day and get your kicks from that. And even more fun, you can tear through valleys at over 200mph, pretending that you are a fast jet pilot. Legally, too. Best of all, you can use 100% of the aircraft’s performance. What percentage of a Mclaren 720S’s full potential can you use on the road? I’d wager just 30% at most.