Top Marques 2008

Top Marques, they call it. Billed as the world’s only live supercar show. It’s in Monaco, and its role is to attract the extremely rich in the hope that they will either a) buy a supercar, ludicrous or otherwise, or b) pour some money into a company planning to make such a supercar but which is still short of the required £5m or so to do so.

It’s possible that, even as the sound of crunching credit drowns the car-chat of lesser beings, there are some recklessly wealthy individuals around who can oblige, too, because for every comment I hear about a Top Marques car as I wander the stands there’s usually a reply along the lines of ‘I’ve got one of those’ or ‘Yeah, I have two on order’.

There are, presumably, exceptions to this. The leering monstrosity that greets you as you enter the main hall of Monaco’s Grimaldi Forum must be one. It’s the Weber F1, its initials standing for ‘Faster One’, and it’s the ugliest car I have ever seen. Even conventionally ugly cars, like a Citroën Ami 6, usually have some redeeming features such as being very functional or revealing a bit of humour. But the Weber is just unremittingly hideous, a slab of ripply panelwork with mutant eyes and some bizarre retro reference in its random front grille. And it’s about seven feet wide. Its Swiss creator says it uses Formula 1 and aerospace technology and it touts lightweight design and four-wheel drive, but I really don’t care.

Things can only get better. Round the corner they do. It’s the Concept Climax, covered as an idea in these pages before and now an aluminium-skinned reality. Designed by students from Coventry University, it’s inspired by an early-1960s Cooper-Climax, but this time there’s no Climax racing engine. Instead it’s powered by a bioethanol-fuelled, 320bhp Subaru flat-four modified by Prodrive.

It’s basic, full of aluminium castings and extrusions and extremely pretty. This first example appeared at last year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, at which time there were plans to make 150 of them. That figure is now down to ten, from which the money raised will finance a closed version. They’ll be pitching to Dragons’ Den soon.

Two more British machines whose creators have high hopes are the Virago and the Beira. ‘This prototype’s a bit tired, actually,’ says Virago’s Andrew Nowson with refreshing realism. ‘It’s a couple of years old and it was at the Autosport show.’ The Virago is another very pretty car, though. Kind of Ferrari 250LM meets 360 Modena and, unlike too many supercars, useably compact. It’s powered by a mid-mounted Ford Duratec V6 with up to 280bhp, prompting comparisons with a Noble, except that there are no turbochargers and it’s on sale at just under £50,000.

But don’t buy one yet. Nowson is planning to up production from 10 to 20 a year to over 200, and to get the whole car retooled to proper production-quality standards. ‘Every body panel will change slightly,’ he says, ‘and we’ll have our own switches and light lenses. It’s all being designed on CAD. The interior will be nothing like the one you see today.’

So what’s with the name Virago? ‘We didn’t want to use an existing name with which there’s no real connection. We wanted a new name. Some people say they buy a new 911 every year and are bored. We want to offer them something different. The car will have low-volume European type approval and there’ll be a two-plus-two within two years. This is a practical, usable car. Now we need to find the money to do it.’

Powertrain apart, the Virago has been designed from scratch. Not so the Beira (named after a species of deer whose genes are much more expedient). It’s the work of Breckland Technologies in Norfolk, which has already built cars for other companies (including Mosler) and helped in the development of GM’s Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky and Opel GT.

Those GM cars’ ‘Kappa’ platform, a kind of shortened Corvette, underpins the Beira. It gets the Corvette V8 engine – in 400bhp trim, too – in place of the Kappa cars’ 2.4-litre straight four. ‘It just dropped straight in,’ says director Mike Rawlings, ‘as if it had been designed to fit.’ Which it probably had.

The doors, dashboard, windscreen and hood are all stock GM, but unlike the General’s machines the Beira has usable luggage space with the hood down. ‘It carries on from where TVR left off,’ Rawlings reckons. But there’s a snag: no possibility of right-hand drive, unless you make do with an automatic. ‘But if we sell what we can to make a profit in Europe then why bother with right-hand drive?’ asks the Beira’s mastermind. Indeed. The Beira will be on sale by November, with a price in the high £50Ks.

The Grimaldi Forum is filled with myriad other hopefuls, such as the credible K1 Roadster (from Belgium) and the incredible Linx (Spain), complete with 2.4-litre V8, semi-open wheels and slash ‘n’ burn styling. Pagani, Gumpert and Koenigsegg are here too, plus the local importers of Lotus, Aston, Maserati and others, and there’s Tesla and Venturi with their electric wonders. But there’s one other which intrigues me.

Back in 1987 I met Ercole Spada, near-legendary designer for Zagato who shaped, among others, the Aston Martin DB4 Zagato. He was working at the IDEA institute in Turin where his designs included the mid-’80s BMW 5- and 7-series. And here he is again, barely changed in the interim, with the Spada Codatronca TS designed with his son Paolo.

‘We attempted to reinterpret the Alfa TZ1 and TZ2,’ says Paolo, ‘and this is the result.’ The little Alfas didn’t have a 630bhp LS7 Corvette engine, of course. Neither did they have internally adjustable anti-roll bars, a 40-channel real-time information system (lap times, g-forces, etc.) and clusters of circular switches and dials each containing a further four circles. The exposed riveted aluminium around the door windows is pretty authentic, though, and there’s something madly retro-race car about the high tail, almost a dorsal fin, with a tiny window at its terminus.

The body isn’t of carbonfibre – too expensive and it begins to break after a few years, reckons Paolo – but of glassfibre, while suspension and brakes are as found in an FIA GT3 car. Testing begins in June; sales are open at about £175,000 plus taxes. It’s mad, but it might just work.