![]() ![]() Launched in 2000, it originally had a Rover engine, soon replaced by a revvy Honda 2.0-litre. You are looking at the greatest lightweight British sports car ever built.Īriel, a teeny outfit of just 30 people based in deepest Somerset, has been honing the Atom for 20 years. This is lunacy distilled – but also lunacy perfected. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, but we also drive leaky two-seaters in the pouring rain. Low-volume British cars from the likes of Lotus and Caterham still enjoy a huge following in countries like Japan and the USA, and their reckless, anti-authoritarian nuttiness is at the heart of their appeal. This has been a peculiar British obsession ever since Lotus founder Colin Chapman hand-built a spindly sports car in his garage in 1948. Take the field of small, lightweight sports cars. From Monty Python to Boaty McBoatface, we are an irreverent, unpredictable, often deranged people. Creative and inventive yes, but essentially mad. He just shook his head in disbelief.īritain is mad, let’s face it. He’d never even heard of ‘panto’ before – imagine his face when Captain Hook came out and all the adults in the audience started booing at the stage. I took an Australian friend to his first pantomime last Christmas. We always did have a reputation for eccentricity and a weird sense of humour. I mean, there’s no denying now that we’re independent-minded, right? Downright bloody-minded. Ok, so it's true that Britain’s reputation may be a little tarnished of late, but I like to think the whole Brexit farrago may have actually strengthened perceptions of us in other ways. The lightweight, super-fast and madly enjoyable Ariel Atom 4 epitomises the very best of British eccentricity, writes Mark Watson
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