The ultimate trackday weapon?
The Cosworth V8-powered Rodin FZED offers full-on driving-dream fulfilment – an F1-style experience in a more user-friendly package
Many people dream of driving a Formula 1 car, but few are lucky enough to experience the thrill of getting behind the wheel of motorsport’s fastest thoroughbreds. You can, of course, if you have sufficiently significant disposal income, buy a vintage F1 car for use on trackdays or in historic racing events, but there is now another way to achieve the closest experience to the pinnacle of the sport that money can buy.
Step forward a little-known New Zealand company called Rodin Cars, responsible for producing the ultimate trackday weapon.
The car may be familiar to many as the Lotus T125, but four years of development and refinement, assisted by W Series champion Jamie Chadwick, have created the Rodin FZED. The company’s tagline is‘nothing like it’, and it’s fair to say that is pretty accurate.
It all began when Australian businessman David Dicker bought five Lotus T125 chassis, having seen potential in the failed project in 2016. Based near Christchurch, New Zealand, his team set about developing the car, replacing a myriad of components with titanium 3D-printed bespoke parts, from screws to the steering wheel, which has resulted in shaving 40kg from its original 650kg weight. It was already lighter than a contemporary F1 car… The chassis is bolted to a 3.8-litre Cosworth V8 that produces 675bhp and a power-to-weight ratio that will embarrass pretty much any other trackday beast.
In the hands of 19-year-old Kiwi Formula 2 race winner
Liam Lawson, the FZED was close to 1.5 seconds faster than a previous-generation Dallara GP2 car around Rodin’s track at its South Island facility.
Red Bull F1 junior Lawson, who has been linked to the project since he was 14 years old, recently shook down the car at Donington Park, the location of Rodin’s new European outpost.“this is the closest thing [to driving an F1 car] and I think this is even faster than an F2 car,”he says.
But if Lawson’s words strike fear into any wannabe drivers,
he has a few calming words too. While the car is not short of grunt and is capable of punchy lap times, the way it drives is intuitive and rewarding for a relative novice.
“When you drive an F2 car, it is such a procedure before you start pushing,”he says.“the brake warm-up and tyre warm-up has to be right before you can push – and if you’re not at the level it’s horrible.
“For this car, I drove out on stone cold tyres but as soon as you get some temperature it is easy to build up to – you don’t have to be on it. When you do get to the limit, it is manageable. It’s not a difficult car to drive. I think you would probably compare this to a 2010 F1 car with a little bit less power. That’s what it feels like and what it looks like.
“A lot of cars that are this fast, you have to build up and quite often when you drive them slowly, they are hard to drive – they don’t like it and you need to be on it quite quickly. As soon as you get brake temp in this car, it’s easy and you can just cruise around. I was doing a couple of drifts out of one of the corners!”
Of course all this fun and sheer speed comes at a cost. The
FZED is aimed at the wealthy, who can splash out £600,000 for a trackday machine, although that is a comparable price to some of the more exotic GT3 race cars. That price tag does not include spares or extras, but it does feature a two-and-ahalf-day training course at Rodin’s New Zealand facility and test track with driver trainer Mark Williamson.
“Obviously it is an expensive experience, but it’s worth it if you can do it because there is no experience like it,”reckons
Lawson.“you can do hot laps in GT cars, but it’s nothing compared to something like this.”
Customers won’t be able to run the car themselves, but Rodin will organise track hire. The FZED has been re-engineered to be easily run by one to two engineers. Top single-seater squad Hitech Grand Prix will be the engineering post-sales support company for Rodin’s customers in the UK and Europe, and customers will be able to access Hitech engineers to service their vehicles and offer any mechanical support they need.
Sadly the FZED cannot be raced as the car is not FIA homologated, although if interest in racing the machines grows, Rodin is keen to investigate the possibility of enabling the FZED to become a competition car. It would be a machine for modern-day
Formula Libre. But for now, it will remain as the ultimate F1-equivalent trackday experience.
“OBVIOUSLY IT IS EXPENSIVE, BUT IT’S WORTH IT IF YOU CAN DO IT BECAUSE THERE IS NO EXPERIENCE LIKE IT”