Page 75 - Cool Britannia

The ST1 road car in Orange, and the all new TSR in bright Yellow, both stunning. We set up shop in one of the offces and took a look at the two cars. Very striking design, hints of Audi R8, some Ferrari lines and touch of Lamborghini aggression, the Zenvo was a brutal looking car (in a good way). The grill and lights give it a ferce look; it’s predator like, even animalistic with strong rear haunches, piercing eyes and dangerous looking mouth. If you saw it in your mirror you’d certainly move over and let her past...The older Orange ST1 was the actual Top Gear test car, in full road trim with an manual gear box and a very funky interior - the Orange honeycomb design on the seats follows through from the air vents and grills on the body. A really great touch. The Yellow TSR however was not built for luxury. This is a fully road legal GT Race car. Carbon fbre interior, alcantara dash and seats, fve point harnesses, full roll cage and a digital dash that bore more resemblance to Lewis Hamilton’s steering wheel than anything else.Most of the panels on the TSR where removed revealing what looked more like a carbon exoskeleton than a car. Huge charging cables were plugged into the front as if it were on life support, whilst the Zenvo team sat on tool cases drinking coffee, all except for two of them; Troels Vollertsen, the man solely responsible for the genesis of the Zenvo was sat at a desk with programmer Flemming ( a quiet unassuming character who apparently invented Bluetooth technology), both staring at lines of code as if it were their favorite TV show. This is what they were here to do... program the traction control. The TSR racer was built purely as a test mule, all be it a very sexy looking one. You know what they say, “a mile on the track is like ten miles on the road” and this car has done plenty of both. The mission this week was to get the two wheel drive 1163bhp monster to drive on snow.So the frst question, there is 1163bhp, Really? So what’s the engine? I’m guessing it’s big Merc AMG V12, or yank V8 with some blowers bolted on. Wrong.... although if you wanted to go that route Troels would be your man. Ever wondered who supercharged all those crazy Lambo’s and Ferrari’s for the Arab market pushing their power to eye watering fgures, well it was Troels. If you want to squeeze the very last drop of power from an already powerful motor, the go to guy is Troels Vollertsen. So we’ve established that the Zenvo does have 1163 horses (and I saw it on the dyno a few weeks later at the factory). But what is the motor? The Zenvo has an all alloy 5.8ltr V8 using a fat plane crank and two air to air cooled superchargers pushing out 1163bhp. Troels has actually built his own engine… This pumping heart is controlled by a seriously sophisticated management system developed by Fleming and Troels to deliver a perfect diagonal graph of power delivery, eliminating any hint of lag from the forced induction. And it sounds amazing.75