Cars You Forgot About: The Tamo Racemo, India’s Sports Car

The Indian car market is predominantly made up of cheaply-made, cheap to buy and cheap to run cars. That’s not a derogatory assessment of it, rather just a statement of what they do well – after all, in a country with an average income equivalent to about £9000 a year, cheap is important.

What India has never been known for is making a sports car. Given the might of Tata Motors – the company that owns Jaguar Land Rover, for some sense of its scale – it’s a surprise that at least one hasn’t emerged. Then you remember it almost did.

This was the Tamo Racemo, revealed at the 2017 Geneva Motor Show, a time when that was still the biggest event on the planet for such things.

Coming from a company that didn’t have much direct involvement with building low-volume cars, the Racemo was a genuine bit of revolution.

The mid-mounted car was built on a modular platform named MOFlex Multi-Material Sandwich. Effectively, this was meant to be a scalable architecture that would allow cars like the Tamo to exist while also serving as the bones for more mainstream vehicles.

Under its mad-looking skin was a pretty sophisticated setup, too. Double wishbone suspension featured on both axles, while a tiny 1.2-litre, mid-mounted three-cylinder engine produced an impressive 188bhp. That sent power to the rear axle through an automated manual gearbox, which we only assume would’ve been a weak point, but Tata said allowed for a sub-six second 0-60mph time.

Inside, the Racemo was full of all sorts of connectivity features to the point that it was marketed as being ‘Phygital’. Bit of sick with the buzzwords, but crammed into there were the likes of cloud computing, geo-spatial mapping, other things we don’t really understand… It did look cool, though, like a stripped-back race car.

Tata Motors were pretty keen to make the Racemo happen, seemingly keen on taking orders right from its reveal. However, things went pretty quiet after Geneva – with the Tamo brand entirely shelved less than a year later.

So India’s sports car was not to be, and has still yet to happen. You could experience the Racemo in Forza Horizon 3, though, so that’s something.