[Auto] Up and Atom: The Ariel innovators behind Britain's Best Driver's Car

[Mr.BaZzAr]

 

With back-to-back victories at Autocar’s Britain’s Best Driver’s Car contests and a five-star road test verdict to its name, the Ariel Atom 4 is a car that punches above its weight. But so is the company that makes it.

You’d be forgiven for driving straight past Ariel’s works, on the A30 Yeovil Road, just outside Crewkerne in Somerset, the first time you visit. It comprises some neat brick buildings that could be tidy barns or small industrial units. But from here come world-beating sports cars. Pull in and to your right is the service department. To your left is the production line, main offices and the R&D and engineering studios. Ariel is threatening to outgrow the place, but you wouldn’t know it from how well organised it is.

It’s a neat site because Ariel likes to do things properly. Inspect an Atom 4 closely and you’ll note how it is beautifully assembled and finished.

I’ve come to see what a typical day is like at Ariel. I’m aware that general manager Tom Siebert does a bit of everything – and he’s spent plenty of time with us over the years – so I’m expecting him to tell me no two days are alike, but that’s not the case.

“I do have a typical day – at the moment,” he says. “I get here at about 7.45am and spend until 10am doing emails. Then the phone starts ringing – customers, more business stuff. And a lot of my job is HR.”

Over the years, Siebert has taken over more of the daily running of the business from his old man, founder Simon Saunders. “My job is just organising the whole thing, basically,” says Siebert. “From ‘matey’s going to fix those tiles’, to budgets and dealing with customers.” Phone up to order an Atom and there’s still a decent chance Tom, who oversaw the car’s development alongside his brother Henry Siebert-Saunders, or Simon, will answer.

Talking with customers, or to plebs like me, is apparently one of the more enjoyable parts of Siebert’s job, allowed by the company’s organisation. “I’ve spent a long time putting in a proper business structure, making sure that for the most part everything functions without having to micromanage people,” he says. Previously, he says, Ariel was really just a group of “mad men who wanted to drink cider and make cars”.

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But what cars they’ve turned into. And what a bike – the two-wheeled Ace is perhaps even more pleasingly finished than the Atom 4 and Nomad. “I think it helps that a lot of us are bikers,” says Siebert. “Because everything is on show, even if it’s not pretty it has to be nice from an engineering perspective.”

Up next will be a new Nomad, currently in development but not as yet a real prototype, followed by the range-extended battery-electric Hipercar. “It’s when you get a physical car that I get excited,” says Siebert. “I like driving them and messing with them. Ultimately it’s such a team effort here. We’re punching above our weight, so it has to be. We take on board ideas from everyone, but Simon, Henry and I will steer it the way we want to go. I’ve got knowledge of the models because I’ve been there from the start.”

That wasn’t planned. Simon Saunders had taken the Lightweight Sports Car Concept he’d shown at the 1996 British Motor Show and turned it into the Atom, and he was running the company with a friend who fell ill. “I’d had and raced bikes as a kid and wasn’t interested in cars,” says Siebert. “I went and worked in a motorbike shop and lived away.” Only a few Atom 1s had been built when “mother begged me to come and help the old man because he was struggling”. He was only supposed to help for three months, “but I’ve never left”.

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That was in August 2000, and for somebody who wasn’t into cars at the time, it’s clear they are now in his veins. “I reckon we must have made five or six Atom 1s when I started,” he says, “though they were pretty rudimentary. The last ones were good and loads of them went to Japan, bizarrely. It’s one car we don’t have that I’d like for the museum.”

James Cousins - workshop supervisor, thirteen years at Ariel

Cousins is in charge of all the car builds and starts his day by ensuring everybody has something to do and knowing the specs of the cars being built. “And I’m building a car at the same time,” he says. “It takes