TVR stunned the world with its radical Cerbera. Matthew Hayward experiences the most outrageous of all,
Seems like a simple instruction, but it takes me a few seconds to gain my bearings in this unorthodox cabin. I had been briefed on the visual cacophony of unmarked buttons and dials by TVR guru James Agger only minutes earlier – with a pre-warning that I would definitely stall the Cerbera at some point. And then the inevitable happens… So I’m slightly red-faced, but, as soon as the riotous AJP V8 engine fires back into life, the mild embarrassment fades into the background.
Every now and again a car manufacturer builds something that blows everything else out of the water, and that’s exactly what the Cerbera did in 1993 when it was first shown at the London Motor Show. TVR’s then-owner Peter Wheeler had a vision to create the fastest, maddest yet most grown-up car ever to wear his marque’s badge. It would have a fixed roof and a pair of seats in the back so you could take the kids out with you, and it would be named after the multi-headed dog of Greek mythology. You know, the one that ferociously guarded the gates of Hell.
I’m seeing the Cerbera today for the first time in quite a while, and I’d forgotten just how low, long and incredibly curvaceous these cars look. Unadorned with spoilers, wings or even door locks and handles, it’s a beautifully clean piece of styling: quite compact by modern standards, but, in much the same way a Testarossa still looks unbelievably wide, its exaggerated proportions make the Cerbera appear almost inconceivably long. That’s because it began life on the drawing board as a stretched, hardtop version of the two-seat Chimaera.
Fundamentally the basic TVR recipe remains the same, even if a few of the ingredients have been tweaked. The Cerbera’s glassfibre body was mounted to a tubular spaceframe chassis, with an extra six inches let into the wheelbase for those rear seats. That meant extra bracing, although the hardtop helped to keep things nice and rigid. But things really changed under the bonnet, where lurked something considerably more potent than the Rover V8 that had provided sterling service in other models for more than a decade.
Wheeler had been looking at more modern alternatives to the compact, lightweight Rover V8 for some time, but it was the sale of the Rover Group to BMW in 1994 that triggered the decision to forge ahead with his plan fo
