[Auto] One-off TVR Cerbera Speed 12 Deemed Too Wild for Production Can Be Yours

[BirSaNN]

This English mad dog is coming up for auction in May.

The TVR Cerbera Speed 12 is the wildest TVR ever to be unleashed on the street.
Built to compete in the GT1 racing series, this one-off road-legal version of the Cerbera has an 800-plus-hp 7.7-liter V-12 and weighs less than 2200 pounds.
This car, the lone surviving example, is coming to Silverstone Auctions this May.
The TVR Cerbera, introduced in 1996, was a powerful fiberglass-bodied sports car that could be seen as the U.K.'s Chevrolet Corvette—or maybe its Dodge Viper. In stock form, the Cerbera topped out at 450 horsepower. It also lacked such rudimentary driver assists as traction control or anti-lock brakes. We called the Cerbera "equal parts terrifying and awesome." What, then, to make of this one-off that nearly doubles its output?

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With the Speed 12, TVR built a 7.7-liter V-12 engine out of two of its inline-sixes and crammed that engine into a Kevlar and carbon-fiber body that weighed roughly the same as a first-generation Mazda Miata. Dangerous? It's like playing cricket with hand grenades. But now, this lone survivor Speed 12 can be yours.

 

Blackpool-based TVR does have a reputation for building brutishly insane vehicles, but the Speed 12 was not merely a fit of madness. Instead, it was built as a potential competitor to the likes of the McLaren F1, the Porsche 911 GT1, and the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR. Today, those three are some of the most desirable road cars ever built, homologation specials exactingly engineered for racing dominance at Le Mans.

 

TVR's take on the GT1 class was less a racing scalpel and more a board with a nail sticking out of it. There were a few teething issues in getting this English-bred mad dog into production. First, the FIA took one look at the monster engine of the Speed 12 and slapped a couple of intake restrictors on it, knocking power down to 675 horsepower. Porsche and Mercedes-Benz had huge R&D budgets next to tiny TVR, and in this case, the German Goliaths stomped David into jelly. The Speed 12 did win a few races in Britain but never competed at Le Mans as intended.

No problem, said TVR. If we can't build the world's fastest race car, let's build the world's most homicidal road car. Its engineers strapped an unrestricted version of the 7.7-liter V-12 onto the dyno—and the dyno promptly exploded. Eventually, power was confirmed to be in the mid-800-hp range.

link: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43435570/tvr-cerbera-speed-twelve-auction/