Ariel Atom 500 V8 built to celebrate 10th birthday

By Brett Davis | September 08th, 2010

Ariel Ltd is currently celebrating its 10th birthday as an automobile manufacturer. To mark the occasion, Ariel employees assembled an example of their upcoming Ariel Atom 500 V8 high performance car in a personal record of five hours, fifteen minutes.

The Ariel Atom 500 V8 is a highly-anticipated ultra light-weight sports car that has been in the making for around two years. It’s not your conventional ‘car’ though, it’s more of a superbike with four wheels and it won’t go on sale until next year.

Ariel has confirmed the Atom 500 will use a 500 horsepower – that’s 373kW – V8 in the car that will weigh around 500kg. With a superbike like power-to-weight ratio, the Ariel Atom 500 V8 is sure to be the scariest car ever to hit the market.

The engine will be a 32-valve Hartley 3.0-litre V8 which was derived from merging two Suzuki Hayabusa 1300cc superbike four-cylinder engines together. The engine is said to spin to 10,600rpm, like a superbike. And with a gearbox that allows flat-shifting, like a superbike, Ariel says the car will easily achieve 0-160km/h in under six seconds and go on to a top speed of 270km/h… like a superbike.

In a recent Autocar report, Atom designer Simon Saunders summed up the Atom 500 V8 build in a few words,

“I believe it’s the role of little firms like ours to go where the big companies can’t or won’t [go]. It’s almost our duty.”

Sure, we can understand that.

Shak

I WANT ONE. NOW.
Nath746

one word: AWESOME!!! I want one!!!
john

I can imagine what this thing is going to be like on top gear. POWER!!!!!!!!
Andrew

So it is built out of Hayabusa engines and will perform like Hayabusa. It also offers about the same amount of protection from the elements as a bike. So I’m thinking, why not just get a Hayabusa?

Anyone with $20,000 and a bike licence in their pocket can walk into a shop and get one today. On the other hand, this Ariel might perform the same but I bet it will cost a lot more than 20k and probably won’t be even available in Australia anyway.

I say: if you want ‘superbike’ experience… just learn to ride a bike.

j

4 wheels can corner faster than 2 wheels, due to the physics of having twice as much tyre with the ground.

Also, superbikes require additional licencing over your traditional car driver’s licence, and don’t have seatbelts, and you need to wear leathers.

So there is a market for the Atom.

Dale

The other benefit of 4 wheels is being able to stop quicker, especially in the wet
J

Common misconception, but not true. Doesn’t matter how much tyre you have on the road. It comes down to weight on that tyre and the ‘stickiness’ of the compound to the road (coefficient of friction). This is simple physics! Wider (or more) tyres do not equal more traction! Wider tyres make stickier compounds possible due to heat produced at rolling contact patch being spread over a larger surface area.

Michael Sutcliffe

We are at a turning point here. Bikes used to be cheap performance through superior power/weight and were only surpassed by cars that were very expensive or really special or both. Now we’re just seeing a new breed of performance vehicle come on to the market that are in the realms of the average joe in the form of the Aerial Atom and KTM X-Bow; kind of like poor mans F1 cars for the road. They offer the handling and braking along with the power to weight of a motorcycle (or better).

These vehicles will rewrite the performance rule book in the affordable market sector. The exciting thing is they’ve got better performance than cars that are orders of magnitude more expensive, and they’ll continue to get cheaper and more available.

Andrew

It sounds good in theory but is not entirely true: Google tells me this Ariel is likely to cost around $160,000 while I found the previous Ariel Atom 3 quoted at 34,300 pounds. So they might be a bargain compared to some exotic supercars but they still are long way away from the performance/price ratio offered by motorbikes. Nor are they exactly in the realms of ‘average Joe’.

Flying High

Personally, I would prefer they spent a bit more than 5.5 hours on it for the price. Take your sweet time and do the job properly.
http://familylocator.org shako

thank you for great post!!!
Michael Sutcliffe

It won’t be a common misconception when we see some braking distances and track times.
Millatime

As I understand it, and I stand to be corrected on this, this thing, or any of the Atoms, cannot be registered in any state in Oz thanks to our nanny state ADR’s. Can anyone confirm?

Slightly less mental, but still offering staggering performance is the Caterham R500 Superlight, quicker than an Enzo!

j

And it beat the Bugatti Veyron around the Top Gear track!

delux

Put that engine in a Swift, and then we’ll talk!
Brownie

Now that……nope, sorry, words just don’t do this car justice….
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000229920376 Stevo Terry

I can’t wait to see what this will do to Clarkson’s face.