New car news

21 February 2007 - 14:00

Atom smasher

A super-lightweight sports car with a tuned two-litre production engine promising motorbike-style thrills? Sound familiar?

This is the KTM X-Bow, Austria's rival to the Ariel Atom, which will debut as a full-scale prototype at Geneva.

Just like the Atom, it borrows a two-litre flat-four engine from a production car - in this case Audi's FSI - and tunes it to within an inch of its life.

KTM insiders say that even the entry-level X-Bow will pack 220bhp, while the top-of-the-range edition could produce 300bhp.

With a kerb weight of just 700kg, that's a power-to-weight ratio of 428bhp per tonne. Wow.

The X-Bow was initially envisaged as a joint project between KTM and Audi, but the German giant dropped out when KTM refused to fit the X-Bow with weight-adding safety equipment.

That's why there's no windscreen on the X-Bow. But fear not - crash helmets will come supplied, and there's even cabin stowage space for them.