Let's freaking go! Flat out in the mid-engined Tuthill-Manx LFG buggy

Never has being physically assaulted from multiple angles felt like such fun. My eyeballs are caked in dirt and both eardrums are definitely perforated, but I’m whooping myself hoarse.

Richard Tuthill has the bit between his teeth now – that steely eyed look of all annoyingly talented drivers when they’re in the zone – and is making it dance. He wrestles the unassisted steering right-left-right then left again (too much rear brake bias apparently, not showboating) into a sweeping four wheel drift before slamming the brakes, pinging down the sequential box and executing a perfect handbrake turn into the path of of the dust cloud he's just created. “We’ve got some testing to do with dust ingress,” Richard says, polishing his glasses.

I have no idea where we are – somewhere in the Carmel Valley, I think. ‘The Quail, a Motorsports Gathering’ (a high end car show, think Goodwood without the hillclimb, sillier trousers, more cash) was in this neck of the woods yesterday, and where this UFO made its world debut. Like all good plans, this one was hastily cobbled together and refined on the fly – nothing more than a long shot enquiry to Richard 24hrs ago as to whether his car actually moved, and what his plans were the next morning... it snowballed from there.

Photography: Mark Riccioni & Huck Mountain

We rendezvous early to shoot the car and ask any strangers that’ll listen if they know any quiet tracks nearby. Success - we’re now following a heavily moustachioed man in a pickup truck in the hope he’ll deliver us to a WRC worthy dirt road... and not dismember us. He dares, because we find ourselves with free rein on a strip that runs along a ridge, surrounded by cinematic views and baby blue skies. And all four limbs attached, for now.

The car in question isn’t really a car at all. It’s a tribute to the OG fibreglass dune buggy – that VW Beetle-based symbol of freedom and good times down the beach. It’s an extreme interpretation granted, but an official collaboration between Tuthill – a company with decades of experience building rally and race cars, mostly Porsches – and Meyers Manx, the company founded in 1964 by Bruce Meyers that’s still alive and kicking today thanks to new boss Phillip Sarofim.

“This project started as a dream between my long time pal Richard and me. We came together to imagine the perfect Meyers Manx, and after we laid the foundation, we invited our friend Freeman Thomas to bring his design brilliance to Tuthill’s engineering. The result is raw, visceral, novel. We call it LFG for a reason...”

We call it the ultimate tool for cocking about in, but let’s talk about that name first. Over to Richard: “I was with my son and my daughter on the way to the airport, and we quite like acronyms – WTF, WRC, etc. I phone Phillip and tried WTF first, but after a bit of chat, we realised that was a bit aggressive, whereas LFG is actually quite a well known saying in the US. They say “Let’s Freaking Go!” – we might say it slightly differently – either way I reckon we all need to wake up in the morning with that attitude, let’s f****** go and do stuff.”

Parked up in a layby it’s a bonkers looking thing. Every car stops for a chat, everyone leaves with a grin. The layout couldn’t be simpler – two seats up front, an engine behind you, and the ability to remove the gullwing doors completely (and take a good chunk of the roof with you), as well as the rear hatch (we try it – it takes the pair of us a couple of minutes to go al fresco) revealing an exposed rear deck. “One customer wants to stick his golf clubs back there, so we’ll make him a custom rack.” Visible at each corner, five way adjustable twin dampers with hydraulic bump stops – proper rally kit – and chunky BF Goodrich tyres.

The Gucci spec continues – there’s a full carbon fibre body, 4WD with front, centre and rear LSDs, lightweight Inconel exhaust, four-piston off road calipers and steel disc brakes. You’d expect nothing less for a car costing in the vicinity of £600k, with production limited to 100. What strikes me though is the soft curves and frogeye lights give it a friendly, approachable stance, with few clues to how hard this thing can rip.

Projecting fun and being usable was a key part of the brief, says Richard. “Look, we’re all aware of how much these lovely cars will cost, but you should go to the pub in it just as much as you should disappear into the mountains.” To be clear, the car you see here isn’t the finished production model – it’s a working prototype assembled to reveal the vision to the world... not necessarily to be driven flat out in the dirt. Before today it had completed a total testing mileage of... one. As in one mile. “The spec here is pretty close actually,” says Richard. “OK so there are plenty of prototype parts, but the chassis will not change.”

Around the front bulkhead it uses a 75kg chunk of metal from a certain two seater roadster from Stuttgart. “That holds the aircon, steering column, wipers etc. And then we fit an FIA cross country roll cage clad in glorious carbon.” It’ll weigh under 1,300kg, which for a mid-engine 4WD car with three diffs, isn’t too shabby. Today we have around 300bhp from a 3.5-litre flat six and straight pipes because Richard wanted it to sound as naughty as possible on the show stand, but “several engine specifications will be offered including a four valve engine derived from the [11,000rpm] Tuthill 911K”.

Before Richard peels our eyelids back on our own private rally stage, I’m tasked with getting us there on the road. The clutch is gentle on pull away, but from there the six speed sequential requires just the right amount of muscle to bang in the next gear. It feels light, instantly, floaty even and the engine rips forward at the slightest twitch of your foot. The ride is predictably sublime, wind well suppressed and besides the lack of power steering, you really could tool about and enjoy this every day – it’s a joyous, open air, analogue experience whether you’re tickling, or giving it the full boot.

I give it a crack on the dirt too, of course I do, and like all properly engineered performance machines it gets better, sharper, keener, smoother the harder I push... until the boundaries of my driving ability butts up against the realisation this is an untested one off. Richard and I swap seats, the mayhem of paragraph one ensures and we’re absolutely flying. The noise – like a million angry hornets – fills the valley, the suspension smothers the road and Richard keeps the car perched perfectly on the limit, although you suspect he’s got another gear or two to give.

The LFG can do things, touch speeds and go places no dune buggy has ever dared to venture

The contradiction here is that this car’s DNA lies in bimbling down to the beach and cruising about on the sand, but the LFG can do things, touch speeds and go places no dune buggy has ever dared to venture. And Richard is adamant its bandwidth won’t go to waste.

“A bit of a history lesson. In 1967, Myers Manx won the inaugural 1000 miles of Mexico, which is now the Baja 1000. We can go and do Baja 1000 – and we will – as a competitor, but why don’t we rerun the original route in a nicer way? While the Baja is going on over there, we’re planning to take 20 of these and do some great driving, but rather than marathon stages, sleeping in one man tents and eating tinned sardines, we can stay somewhere up the road a bit nicer.” Amen to that – and if you need a co-driver, you know where to find me.