Page 77 - Cool Britannia

So, how do you get this immense power onto the tarmac with any kind of effective traction? That’s the clever bit. An Italian Cima paddle shift transaxle is used to house all the cogs. The clutch however is the clever bit… coupled with the very funky looking hydraulics mounted on the back of the box, all controlled by the millions of lines of code fowing from Flemings fngertips. The speed and precision of the gear changes has allowed them to do away with the synchromesh and use race style Dog rings. They’ve kept it very simple, which is achieved by very complicated and meticulous engineering and control…The Yellow car bursts into life as the team jump-to securing the bodywork. The roller door goes up and the TSR reverses out into snow. Troels at the wheel and Fleming riding shotgun watching the screen mounted on the passenger side. We follow them up to the circuit in the Audi Q7 and watch. Ten minutes later and we are back inside, body panels off and heads being scratched. Something is not working. I leave them to it and we decide to practice with the drone. I’ve had one quick lesson from my 14 year old son Harvey, who basically took it out of the box, set it up and few it around the outside of our house to look at his brother through the kitchen window. It’s easy he said.... Remembering my instructions (and a quick call home to Harvey) in no time the Typhoon is airborne, once I get used to looking through the camera by watching the screen on the radio control unit, and not trying to watch the actual craft it gets easy. I try a few camera moves and as I get braver some low fying, but in temperatures around minus 10 the battery time is very limited. So we head back to recharge and see how the team is doing. They are ready for another run, but I can see the frustration as random warning lights are presenting in the management system. About 30 minutes later the shutters go up and the TSR rumbles back into the garage. This time we have smiley faces as they climb out of the cockpit. All the faults are gone. It was the temperature, the car had been driven out here over three days in a freezing cold truck and it just took a bit time for all the electronics to regain a sensible ambient temperature. Now the testing can begin.That evening over dinner I ask Troels why he decided to build his own car. He’s a humble and understated man, so he shrugs and starts to tell me a story... as a schoolboy he used to help out in a local garage near to his school. The guys that owned it went off to Finland to do some work and earned a lot of money. So one day they rock up at the garage (which is next to the school yard) in a Black Lamborghini Countach, all the school kids are hanging on the wire fence literally climbing over each other to see this car. A young Troels included. The guys saw Troels (their garage helper and chief tea maker) and said let’s go for a drive. Without hesitation Troels was over the school fence and through the famous scissor doors of this raging bull. He was bitten by the petrol head bug, this was the start of an obsession to build engines that propelled Denmark’s rally cars with the same gut wrenching velocity he’d felt that day in the Countach. So he built a business from tuning Rally engines, his work with supercharging and turbo charging won him some notoriety.So as we get into the second bottle of wine I ask why Praesto? It’s home and I like it… You can’t argue with that. That is where the idea was born, the frst car was made in Troels’s own workshop, which is ancient history as the Zenvo brand celebrates it’s tenth anniversary this year at home in its own state of the art factory, although still within fve minutes of the Vollertsen family home.We watch the sun come up (at 10:30am) the following morning and spend the day shooting the Zenvo as this was our window with the weather. Standing waist deep in snow drifts and hanging from the back of cars was the order of the day… punctuated with some glorious moments of drone fying. The vista from it’s 4k camera gave an otherwise unseen perspective to our dramatic environment although the sub zero temperatures were not helping any of our camera gear. That night the dinner conversation had stepped up a notch now we’d all seen what this car could do. The forecast for the following day was snow, all day. The morning was given over to testing. Nigel asked me, had I driven the car yet? I hadn’t as I wanted to make sure we got all our flming done. Today I would drive the car.77