The TVR Cerbera Speed 12. One ton. One thousand horsepower. Koenigsegg wasn’t the first company to build a road car with one horsepower for every kilo of body weight, but they were sure as shit the first to make it safe for public consumption. The Cerbera part of the name comes from the three-headed beast that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology, and it’s pretty fucking fitting for this lunatic creation. It’ll happily help you through them.

The Speed 12 was designed to be TVR’s answer to the mighty McLaren F1 at the racetrack and on the highway. How do you beat one of the fastest, most powerful cars ever built? More speed and more power of course! 

He’s hiding from the engine.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that those goals were met thanks to the force of volcanic nature that was bolted down under the hood. Powered by a behemoth 7.73 litre V12 with ‘around 1000 horsepower’, the car’s true output is unknown because it destroyed TVR’s dyno when they tried to test it. Yikes.

Sadly the Speed 12 never really got out of the racing development phase before rule changes and the scrapping of the FIA’s GT1 class forced it out of competition. Not to worry, thought TVR, we’ll build an updated GT2 version so we can still take our unhinged creation racing! We’ll push ahead with the road-going version so our loyal customers still get to terrify themselves as well!

Big D.

That didn’t happen either. The road car, which was planned to have a top speed north of 240 mph, proved just a bit too terrifying. TVR boss Peter Wheeler drove the car home one night after work and returned the next morning (probably white-faced and with dirty trousers) to declare that the V12’s power was simply too much. The car was undriveable and really, really, REALLY unsafe in the real world on public roads.

TVR continued to race the Speed 12 in the British GT series but its brief life as a road car was over. One by one the road-going prototypes were dismantled and used for spares for TVR’s racing efforts. That would seem to be the end of the story, or is it…?