The latest from skeleton performance car company Ariel Motor Company is 1,500 pounds of tubular steel, carbon fiber, and a 525-horspower Honda Civic engine. But the Atom 4RR isn’t the most extreme version of the car possible. The company’s sales and PR manager told CarBuzz to never rule it out, before describing what an even more hardcore Atom could look like.
‘Well, You’d Need More Power’
Ariel Atom 4RRAriel Motor
CarBuzz sat down with Ariel sales manager Ben Calderaro-Gunn at the Goodwood Festival of Speed this week. Ariel is there to show off its cars and to run the 4RR up the hill climb, as one would expect. We couldn’t resist asking Calderaro-Gunn if he thought the 4RR would be the most extreme Ariel Atom, and he replied simply: “Never say never.” But that’s not all.
How would you make the Atom even more extreme? “Well, you’d need more power,” he said, as though it was as natural as the need to drink water. “The only thing you could do is more power. And the chassis can certainly handle it,” he added.
“We do have owners that have extracted more power out of them, and they’ve gone even more custom. We’ve got a chap in the States that’s gone 1,000 horsepower, pretty much, or actually one over here in the UK with 1,000 horsepower,” Calderaro-Gunn said.
It’s not as simple as just cramming in more horsepower, though. Calderaro-Gunn pointed out that the cars aren’t very driveable at those four-figure power levels.
“It’d be good if we could do something, you know, even more powerful in the future. You know, it’d be nice to maybe revisit the V8 again, put a modern V8 in it.”
-Ben Calderaro-Gunn, Ariel Motor Sales Manager
Calderaro-Gunn said that it would be nice to take another stab at an Atom V8. The company crammed a 500-horsepower 3.0-liter V8 into the car in 2008, 25 fewer ponies than this new turbocharged 2.0-liter four.
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This Atom is designed to be face-meltingly quick.
“We still get asked questions about it,” he said. Though he pointed out that the new four-cylinder car with more modern chassis tech and shocks was “such a better and faster car.” he said even the current 400 hp 4R is faster on track than the V8.
Boutique Builder Is Looking At US Expansion
Ariel Atom 4RRAriel Motor
What V8 might work for the car? “It would need a serious amount of looking at,” he said, and so it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. “We’ve got the Nomad 2 to focus on, and the current Atom 4.” Calderaro-Gunn said that the next Atom is two to three years away, though, and “who knows what we do with the next Atom?”
The next Atom could end up in the US in higher numbers than ever before. Calderaro-Gunn said that the US market was growing, and that “we just need a couple of reliable dealers.” He said that the company is assessing to see if it makes more sense to look at manufacturing US-spec cars in the UK, or finding a replacement manufacturer in the US to help do it. “It’s still a work in progress as to how we can kind of recover that at the moment. But yeah, there’s definitely a market for it, and it’s pretty big.”
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But only 25 people will get to own one.
Individual state laws are also an issue. “One state will go, yeah, fine, we can have the Atom in any trim.” Another, he said, will demand a windshield, body panels, and others.
“But it’s all being worked on,” he said. So there’s at least some hope for more insane Ariel go-karts in the States.
