Best of the V12 series episode 3 – the barely legal one (Cerbera Speed 12)

The McLaren F1 is by and large the OG V12 Speed King. And it wasn’t just the speed, but also the award-winning aerodynamics, and technology so ahead of its time, you’d be forgiven for not realising this was a beast of the 90s. One auto brand that took notice was TVR, and in 1998 they made the ultimate declaration: they were going to build a faster, more outrageous supercar than the McLaren F1. And so begins the journey of the mighty Cerbera Speed 12…

Here’s to the crazy ones

Behold, the TVR Cerbera Speed 12. A car that looks like something Donatello from TMNT would put together in collaboration with Bruce Wayne, with blueprints from Lex Luthor. It was a monster, and as you might have guessed from the title, barely (road) legal.

An unusual variation of the V12 powered this avant garde steed from hell. They took two of their potent Speed Six engines, modified them to full race specification, and mated them to a common crank. The result? A gargantuan 7.7L V12 with more than 1000 horses on heat that was so powerful, it broke TVR’s dyno.

The building cost and overwhelming power of the engine meant that only 5 were produced. Kinda reminds me of the Fujitsu K supercomputer, which surpassed 10 petaflops, but would take an entire village to power. Not for the common man, that’s for sure.

Round 1

They first wanted to enter the Speed 12 into LeMans, but before it was sufficiently developed to win races, the rules changed and made them obsolete. They didn’t give up, though, and entered the British GT championship, with huge restrictors that shed a few of those 1000+ horses to a reasonable 700 ponies.

Believe it or not, the drivers still had trouble keeping the car on the track, so just imagine what the unrestricted version would have been like. McLaren, meanwhile, must have been laughing their helmets off.

Round 2

TVR STILL didn’t let up. In 2000, they launched a “road-legal” version of the Speed 12, which they called the Cerbera Speed 12. They produced just one unit, which was displayed at the British Motor Show. It looked like a collage of every racing car, with an unrestricted engine and massive ass Goodyear Fioranos, and went on sale for £160,000, TVR’s most expensive yet.

One brave soldier, Peter Wheeler, took the prototype Cerbera Speed 12 for a spin. And just like Alan Grant decided not to endorse John Hammond’s Jurassic Park, Wheeler concluded that the car was “unusable on the road”. You don’t need me to tell you what happened next.

Round 3

So in 2003, they said “screw it” and went to the one place you can always find a crazy enough buyer for your stoopid ass car. The Autotrader. It looked like TVR’s spies didn’t get their hands on McLaren’s F1 blueprint, so they fitted mild cams and ECU mapping onto their Cerbera Speed 12, which took the power down a notch to 880 bhp.

You know what they say, three times’ a charm, and sure enough, a thousand modifications, failed driving tests and sleepless nights later, the Cerbera Speed 12 finally had its day, appearing in several UK magazines, prominent motor shows and even on Gran Turismo 4.

In good hands

This 880 bhp monster weighs just 1,000 KG, will get you from 0 to 100 km/h in under 3 seconds, and has currently passed into the ownership of a Wheeler-approved enthusiast. I wonder what the Wheeler TVR test entails…

So that’s it. In at number 3 on our Best of the V12 series is one that was barely (road) legal. Keep your eyes peeled for more next week!

If you want to see someone having a go with the Cerbera Speed 12, check this out.