Exclusive video: tearing round Goodwood in the Caparo T1

I hesitate to begin with an expletive, but flipping hell! I’ve just been round the Goodwood circuit in something that resembles a cross between a greyhound and Thrust2.

Usually car launches are inoffensive affairs: you stand around with a glass of warm orange juice and doze through an overlong talk. But the Caparo T1 launch was very different.

I arrived at the Jackie Stewart pavilion last Thursday and was strapped straight into the passenger space. I wondered what was about to happen, but not for long. From the moment the engine burst into life the Caparo grabbed me by the pants, pinned me down to the carbon fibre seat and shouted: “Now are you impressed?”

And it kept shouting it until I was forced to admit I was. Then it taught me three punishing lessons. Lesson one: 0-60mph in 2.5sec. Lesson two: being subjected to 3G around Goodwood’s bends. And lesson three: 205mph flat out down the straights.

Oh, and slamming the brakes on (worth another 3G).

After five minutes of this car you feel as though you’ve been in an F-15 at an air display. You’ve banked, rolled, almost flown upside down, and thrown up into a bag. Only pilots and Formula One drivers normally experience that kind of drubbing. By way of comparison, the supercharged Lotus Exige 240R – one of the best road-legal track cars around – creates forces of about 1.5G.

What on earth were the Caparo’s designers thinking of? Probably the McLaren F1, the car that ripped up and rewrote the rulebook of street-car abilities. The McLaren was launched in 1993 and is still regarded by many as the most important car-design benchmark for a generation. At least it was until the Bugatti Veyron came along, and the men behind the F1 are the same as those behind the Caparo T1.

Graham Halstead and Ben Scott-Geddes both worked at McLaren before leaving to set up their Freestream consultancy in 2004. They were later joined by the F1’s designer Gordon Murray, so making the T1 in many ways the F1’s spiritual descendant. Even the colour of the promotional car is the same – off-orange is the traditional, original McLaren F1 hue.

The Caparo has taken three years to build, the design team constantly obsessing over ways to make it lighter, stronger and faster than anything in its class, and with little regard to how it should look or to the comfort of its occupants. They aren’t letting journalists drive it just yet so it’s too soon to say precisely how capable it is.

But in one sense it has already broken new ground: in case you hadn’t noticed, each new range of models from major motor manufacturers is fatter and heavier than the last – a trend that has continued for the past two decades.

The latest VW Golf, for example, weighs twice as much as the original. This evolution has been a bit like watching William Shatner progress from being Captain Kirk to the portly TJ Hooker, and finally – now that he’s perhaps too fat even to squeeze into a police uniform, to big-bottomed Denny Crane in Boston Legal.

By using composites and other advanced materials, the Caparo has opened up a world of new possibilities. It has a one-piece car-bon-fibre chassis that is very strong yet light. And because of the car’s lightness – it weighs 20% less than the smallest Smart car – it holds great implications for the fuel economy of cars of the future. It will no doubt be remembered as the pioneer that boldly went where others didn’t dare.

Goodwood was chosen for the car’s first public appearance because it’s probably the fastest circuit in Britain, with no sharp corners to slow you down. But to be honest, just a dash round the M25 before dawn would have been enough to convince you that you were experiencing something very different from the norm. The sound and feel of the mid-mounted engine, your proximity to the tarmac and the car’s sheer agility were unlike anything I’ve previously experienced.

And when you start to examine the engineering philosophy behind this car, you can see why. Scott-Geddes and Halstead aimed for a “sweet spot”, where a weight of roughly 500kg would match a power output of about 500bhp. Sweet because you can’t make a car much lighter than that and expect it to be sufficiently strong or crash-resistant, and you don’t want it any heavier because then you’re stuck in a vicious circle of extra weight requiring a bigger engine, and a bigger engine adding weight.

And they almost hit the mark; the car weighs 550kg and the 3.5 litre V8 engine puts out 575bhp. Thus it achieves the holy power-to-weight ratio of 1000bhp per tonne. To put that into perspective, no other production car comes close. In fact the only production machines I know of that have achieved this are motorcycles – the Yamaha YZF-R1 is one.

In evolutionary terms the Caparo is as pure as a shark, and no concessions have been made to the stylists. Instead, the designers concentrated on shaving off weight gram by precious gram, and adding power. Lots of ideas were tried, and many were discarded; the original 480bhp 2.4 litre supercharged engine, for example – “It just didn’t have the poke” – was shelved in favour of a more powerful unit based on Indy car design and made of weight-saving aluminium. It’s mated to a magnesium gearbox, and other components are titanium.

Creating such an exotic car costs money, of course, especially when you’re challenging the laws of physics: you could drive it fast upside down on the roof of a tunnel thanks its aerodynamic shape, which at 150mph produces a downforce equal to its weight.

Fortunately for its British creators, a white knight in the shape of Caparo – a steel and materials multinational run by Swarj Paul and his son Angad – came along at the car’s experimental stage. The pair bought a controlling stake in Freestream and renamed it Caparo Vehicle Technologies.

Early reports suggested the T1 would be as quick as the Bugatti Veyron; it isn’t, and people who expected a couple of plucky Brits to have come up with a Veyron killer will be disappointed. It would be akin to expecting a Spitfire to take on the whole of the Luftwaffe, and win. In a straight line a Veyron would pull ahead of the T1 almost immediately as it has better traction and, ultimately, twice the power – even though it can’t match the T1’s power-to-weight ratio.

Round a circuit, though, and thanks to its lightness, the T1 would probably have the edge. It’s as minimalist as a wheelnut: no electric windows, no stereo, no spare wheel, no climate control . . . not even carpets. It’s really a barely road-legal, stripped-down track car.

By contrast the Veyron is a practical car with storage space and creature comforts. You could take it to the supermarket and do the daily commute to work in it – assuming you could hold on to your licence. But the comparison is not really fair. The Veyron is an £850,000 car; the T1 costs a quarter of that. Which isn’t too costly if you consider that the closest you could otherwise get to the T1’s performance would be a Le Mans car.

Judging from the number of advance orders that have been placed, Caparo has got its marketing right – the first year’s production run of 20 cars has already been presold.

So should you get your name on the waiting list? If you’re a track-day enthusiast or a collector, then yes, do it now. But if you’re just looking for something fast and sporty, then no. Instead spend your money on two Audi R8s; you’ll have twice as much fun.

Nearly.

Vital statistics

Model Caparo T1

Engine type 3500cc, eight cylinders

Power/Torque 575bhp @ 10,500rpm/310 lb ft @ 9000rpm

Transmission Six-speed sequential

Fuel/CO2 N/A

Price £211,500

Date of release Waiting list open

The opposition

Model Radical SR4 £35,263

For Fastest road car (until now)

Against Completely bonkers Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradali (CS) £133,025

Model Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradali (CS) £133,025

For Looks great, relatively sane

Against No longer made, so a used buy

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