Ariel Atom 500 V8 built to celebrate 10th birthday
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.
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