From the archives: driving the Bowler Qt Wildcat

Driving a 300sTR around on public roads is overkill of the most delicious type. People stare, then lose control of their lower jaw function. Some – the weak ones, possibly ramblers – scream and run. The Wildcat bellows around corners, looking like it just escaped from somewhere that uses lots of biohazard signs on its headed notepaper. It tips and leans, but somehow manages to maintain a weird sense of body control when you’re in the driver’s seat. Driving it, you can feel the blocks of the thick, tall off-road tyres toppling over as you initially turn in – a bit like hitting a small section of gravel – before the entire thing squishes down over its diagonal and settles into a kind of bizarrely stable kinked-over stance. It is not the last word in roadholding. It matters not one bit.

This feature was first published in Issue 209 of Top Gear magazine (2010)

Photography: Justin Leighton

You can’t force it – this is not a car that you take by the scruff, on the road at least – but merely feed the nose into the corner, allowing the suspension to load up and do its thing. Go too far, and the lack of limited-slip diff spins away power, even with permanent 4x4. But by that point, you’re choking back childish whoops and trying to figure out why every car doesn’t make you feel like this. It’s not ‘good’ by accepted terms and conditions – its operational parameters stand some way outside normal usage – but, God, it is funny. 

Of course, you might vaguely recognise the Qt. Just over 18 months ago, well-established off-road racing parts supplier Qt services purchased the rights to the Wildcat brand from Bowler off-road, and have embarked on a systematic set of improvements to the basic off-road racecar. Including, for the first time, the introduction of this roadgoing variant, the 300sTR - a barely tamed version of the car that made Richard hammond become quite insanely emotional and start shouting “I AM A DRIVING GOD!” at a telly camera. A small and excited ejaculation that I’m just now beginning to understand.

Weirdly, the Wildcat is actually quite small, wrapped delicately around its chassis, with great big gobs of engineering honesty peering through the various channels and gaps. The chassis itself looks quite capable of withstanding a small nuclear warhead. The black 300sTR in front of me looks like the kind of thing that delivers them. 

Of course, being the off-road version of something like the Porsche GT3 RS, the kind of serious competition car that has only lightly grazed the buffet of usability and is therefore only wearing a light oiling of civility, getting in is not pretty. Even though this is a ‘roadgoing’ Wildcat, the basic entry and egress points remain the same as the cars that attack the Dakar, which means that just getting in involves trying to post yourself through a small bathroom window three feet off the floor. There is, as ever, a knack.

I couldn’t find it and looked like a tubby contortionist having a stroke every time I got in or out. The inside is more of the same; the 300sTR may be the car that leans most defiantly towards road use, but just because it has an iPod connection, speakers, a couple of storage pockets, aircon and a carbon-effect dash top, it does not mean that you’ll be lounging in Maybach-ish comfort.

Still, when you fire it up, you start to see what Richard was on about. The car we have here has been custom-built for a Ugandan customer who – get this – wants to use it as a golf buggy. seriously. He’s had plenty of the more common-or-garden supercars and now wants something unique that won’t stand a chance of doubling up in the club carpark. To that end, he’s had a golf bag carrier/coffin installed under the rear clamshell, the aforementioned interior bits ’n’ bobs and a venerable and easy-to-fix Rover 4.0-litre V8 under the bonnet, though you can have the car with that Jag 4.0 or 4.4, with 300/400bhp and a sequential ’box if you so prefer. Which sure beats the 5mph electric golf bat chariots at my local course.

The motor may only push out just over 280bhp, but with gearing low enough to yank the car through wet clay, the Wildcat can get along at a fair old pace, the noise and eager leanings of the suspension accentuating every input. There are no nuances. This is brutal and full-volume. and the better for it. There’s extra sound-deadening for the cabin – lord knows where that is – a similarly sound-absorbing headlining (spoiling us now), an SPA digital dash, some four-point harnesses and... not much else. And even though the sTR may forgo the racecars’ incredible 60mm donerre lithium fast-rebound dampers (which cost several grand a corner) in favour of more prosaic nitrogen gas items, it still only really shines when you drive it off-road.

The faster you go, the better it gets – the more chance the suspension gets to do its thing – but even at modest speeds and in this more restrained format, the Wildcat loves mucking about, kicking up fist-sized clumps of earth and generally bounding around terrain that you’d struggle to walk over. The steering is surprisingly easy and accurate, and the excellent brakes are really only hampered by those aggressive tyre treads. The five-speed manual is long and chunky, and the kind of industrial-heavy that makes you want to double-declutch even though it’s not strictly necessary. But it all feels inherently right.

The compact exterior dimensions make it a doddle to thread through obstacles (traffic included), the uncorrespondingly long wheelbase making it stable in any situation short of actually driving it off a cliff. Which, incidentally, someone has done, and survived without significant injury. In fact, it feels like the sort of car that even if you did lob it off a 400ft sand dune, flip it or run it into a garden wall, all you’d have to do would be turn it back over, bend the panels straight with some sort of sledgehammer surgery and carry on.

You can see precisely bugger all out the back, but Qt will stick you a reversing camera on if you really do want to parallel park. Personally, I’d be more tempted to arrive at a preferred parking spot, stick it in reverse and just gas it. They’ll either move, or be squashed. Weirdly, when your mind starts to wander, you wonder what would happen if you stuck it on proper sticky sports SUV tyres and wound it down on the dampers. Possibly some sort of bizarre superMotard-style off-roader, suitable for very little apart from sh*ts and giggles. But a lot of giggles.

It’s a bit like a suit of armour, this car. a feeling of invincibility barely tempered. despite pretensions toward normality – Qt’s own press release intimates that the 300 is ‘at home in the city of London as it is in the deserts of Morocco’ which is blatantly rubbish – the Qt 300sTR is really just a racecar without the decals, a competition car furnished with some basic creature comforts. Very much like that GT3 RS I mentioned earlier. And if you get cars like the GT3 RS, you’ll understand the Wildcat. It doesn’t cover lots of bases, doesn’t appeal to everyone, doesn’t really make sense in 99 per cent of situations. But it does wrench your senses, pop your ears and fill your head with little-boy shouting. When you find that one per cent bubble where time, place and the right conditions intersect, and you’re in the ’cat, you’ll know what perfection really means.