Maximum Caterham

This is the Caterham Levante, a bonkers twist on an already twisted, bonkers concept. A standard Caterham is mad enough. A 500-hp, 1,100-pound Caterham offering twice the power-to-weight ratio of a Bugatti Veyron is never going to be sensible, either. Nor is a $218,000 price tag. Unless you're a billionaire, of course. And then it makes a very good deal of sense, because this sort of world-beating British boffinry should never come cheap, and what you have at the end of it is a car that goes faster and sounds meaner than just about anything in creation. Most of all, if you can afford it, you're buying the warped brainchild of a total madman. Step forward, Mr. Russell Savoury.

It's important to understand that Savoury's background is motorbikes and tuning them for racing purposes. For more than 20 years, his "careful interpretation" of the racing rule book has scored him countless race and championship wins at the very hottest, most competitive domestic and international levels. So he's something of a boffin in bike tuning circles.

Russell started thinking about cars 16 years ago. He was knee-deep in Yamaha engines at the time, and the engineers at Yamaha were plowing a distinctive five-valves-per-cylinder furrow. To the cynic it was a marketing tool. To the tuner it was a way of cramming more swirling inlet charge into the combustion chamber, by way of the greater surface area provided.

Whatever the reasons, the 1,000cc, 20-valve Yamahas decimated the opposition in racing and didn't stay in showrooms long enough to gather dust. Russell liked them, they got him results and his flow-rig showed that, marketing reasons aside, five tiny valves per cylinder were a great way to cram mixture into the engine, especially at higher revs.

So what, Russell thought, would two Yamaha superbike top-ends be like bolted together to make a tiny 2.0-liter V8? Most sane people would think a thought like this at last call and let it go. Russell saw the pub-plan through to completion.

The RST-V8 started life as two five-valve 1,000-cc Yamaha top-ends grafted onto a set of home-milled billet-alloy crankcases with a plain steel crankshaft. The donor bike had a redline of 13,000 rpm, and so, too, did this original 2.0-liter Frankenstein.

Time and miles, breakages and problems saw a gradual metamorphosis from off-the-shelf Yamaha parts to bespoke, forged, sand-cast and die-cast replacements, to the point where the only Yamaha parts that still exist on the fully finished version are the blank cylinder heads. The RST-V8 you see here is produced entirely by Russell Savoury's Motopower and his list of trusted suppliers.

In supercharged form the RST-V8 knocks out a truly disrespectful 500 hp at 10,000 rpm. These two figures spell havoc for most gear clusters, so gearbox maker Quaife had its work cut out.

We drove an early prototype nearly three years ago. The normally aspirated 2.4-liter V8 was bolted into a stock Caterham with a de Dion back axle and a Quaife six-speed box. With "only" 420 hp on tap, the motor would pull top gear down to a walking pace and pull, hard, in top from tickover. But the moment we got jiggy with the revs and throttle loadings, changing gears got a bit like playing Jenga in the dark. Pissed.

Shifting up under full load, using full revs was a lottery. It didn't help that it was lighting up its rear tires at three-figure speeds in the dry, either.

It was a real yin-and-yang situation. Here was a tiny, tiny engine with massive power, dizzy rev limits and ultraresponsive manners bolted to a gearbox that felt like it'd been plucked from a 1979 Bedford CF van. Some catchup was needed.

If it had been mid-engine or rear-engine, the gearbox problem wouldn't exist. There's masses of transaxle knowledge out there fostered by decades of single-seater experience. But here, in a front-engine Caterham, there were all sorts of problems to overcome, like packaging, heavy prop shafts and an engine with characteristics quite unlike anything else ever encountered.

Car gearboxes are the size and sophistication of Watford compared to bike boxes. So Quaife, being the gear peers that it is, soldiered away at the problem until it reached a slick shifting solution. The finished box is a sequential six-speeder with the option (at $19,000) for steering wheel–mounted flappy-paddle shifters.

A passenger ride through Hertford's city center will remain etched in our motoring memory for some time. Pussycat manners. Smooth and quiet idle at traffic lights. Crisp pick up. No popping. No banging. Delicate, sophisticated, mild mannered. We were completely unprepared for what happened at the derestriction signs.

Russell (for it was he) saw the open road ahead, banged it down what seemed like 53 gears and floored it to the redline in a manic, mass-murderer style. We swear the revs didn't drop 100 rpm through each upshift. Not only are you sitting with your butt three inches off the floor, but this engine, that once sounded as docile and inoffensive as a Rover 75's, started snarling through its eight inlet trumpets so hard it was nudging the pain threshold. All we could do was swear. And swear. And pray.

The prototype was no more civilized when we got a chance to drive it round North Weald Airfield. Every bump, every strip of overbanding, every tiny chip of gravel would send the rear wheels spinning as they vividly admitted defeat from this relentless surge of howling power. An 11,000-rpm V8? Oh, Lordy. As soundtracks go, it doesn't get much better. Think Formula One and you begin to get the idea.

Since then, in a quest for driveability and much-needed grip, the Levante has had massively reworked suspension parts, geometry and weight distribution. It's well sorted now. And Russell's mad V8 has popped up in the Caparo and the crazy Australian Skelta G-Force Targa Tasmania car (YouTube search "Skelta G-Force" and turn up the volume).

Over a 16-year gestation period, this tiny dry-sump engine has done some serious development miles. It's only 19 inches by 19 inches by 20 inches and weighs just 200 pounds. It is a jewel. A forged steel, flat-plane crankshaft runs fore and aft connected to the short-skirted, forged slipper pistons by H-section, forged steel conrods. The quad cams are driven by a tooth belt hidden from view beneath an exquisite carbon-fiber cover on the front of the engine. Fuel is squirted in through 24 inlet valves via a single injector per cylinder.

We could give you the details about the supercharger system but, frankly, we wouldn't recommend it. In a front-engine, rear-wheel-drive car, 420 hp is enough. If you find the normally aspirated version "a bit lame" and in need of "a bit of a lift," then clearly you're a twunt.

Russell has built eight of these Levantes. When we spoke to him last week all eight were sold, and then this week, one may still be for sale — such is the fickle nature of small-scale production runs. It also transpires that those customers who ordered the positively psychotic supercharged versions are beginning to shuffle around awkwardly and mutter things about "second thoughts" and "credit crunch."

Thank goodness for that. To mute the electrifying induction howl of a V8 with a five-figure rev ceiling and ridiculous valve timing is a sin. Trust us on this one, forced induction would spoil the enjoyment, both aurally and spiritually.

Speaking of enjoyment, there's another catch to buying a Levante. They won't let you take delivery until you've had a full-blown two-day driving course. I guess it's the litigious society we're in, but having driven one — or tried to drive one, we should say — we can kind of see where they're coming from.

"Yes, Your Honor, my clients did their very utmost to make sure that Mr. Chutney-Horseface was a capable and competent driver." Etc.

The relationship with Caterham is an obvious one: mad car plus mad engine tuner plus mad engine equals the maddest car ever. It may have a starting price of $218,000, but we doubt any normal car twice its price is going to get anywhere near it on a track day. And if it does, the driver probably won't be having half as much of a ball.