Up In Flames - Caparo T1

If you were an extremely-wealthy speed-freak a decade ago, you didn’t exactly have much choice. You were stuck with a choice between an oh-so-common Bugatti Veyron or a Koenigs-what CCX. Neither of these had more than 600 horsepower per tonne. So, at the 2006 Top Marques auto show in Monaco, Caparo show up and make these cars look pathetic. In fact, they DOUBLED their power-to-weight ratio.

So what exactly do you get in one of these?

Engine: 3.5-litre V8 with 575 horsepower. The engine is naturally-aspirated and produces peak power at 10,500 RPM. Peak torque doesn’t arrive until 9,000 - a speed where even Honda S2000s and Lexus LFAs are past their best work. If you’re daring enough to fill up with methanol, the engine supposedly has been tested for 700hp.
Gearbox: 6-speed Hewland sequential. Nothing but the best of course. Upshifts in 60 milliseconds and downshifts in 30.
Aero: It looks closer to an F1 car than pretty much anything out there. It has F1-inspired bodywork including enough rear louvers to bamboozle Adrian Newey. It produces 875kg of downforce at 150mph.
Chassis: The car is incredibly light - as low as 470kg according to some sources. That gives it over 1200hp/tonne which would still be a record today.

As for performance, it will go from 0-60mph in under 2.5 seconds and reach 100 in under 5 seconds. Top speed is 205mph. But most impressively, it will pull over 3 Gs in fast corners and under hard braking. At the time, few cars would pull more than 1 G, and even today’s hypercars can’t even do 1.5. These stats are probably compareable to an F2/GP2 car. But this car has two seats and is road-legal (OK - it’s more of a “1+1” since the passenger seat is tiny).

In 2007, it set a 1:10.6 at the Top Gear Test Track. This is 3 seconds faster than the fastest road-legal car even today. However, Clarkson threw out the time because it was unable to clear a speed bump. This was because they were driving an early prototype - the customer version would have a front-axle lifter installed.

Evo Magazine tested it and were full of praise for it. They drove it on track and took it on a 400-mile road trip through traffic, rain and everything you’d find in the real-world. Despite all this, the car held up well and was judged to be far more useable than anything else similar. Not only that, this car sold for around £250,000, whereas top hypercars were into the seven figures. Sounds like the perfect sports car, right?

So where did it all go wrong?

The Caparo T1 quickly gained a reputation for being unreliable. If somehow this thing entered an F1 race, there would be more DNFs than Pastor Maldonado driving a 2015-17 McLaren Honda. Let’s have a look at the incidents:

• During filming for Fifth Gear, the car caught on fire while going over 150 mph. The driver managed to stop and escape as the car turned into a fireball, but he was injured.
• During filming for Top Gear, the car’s floor panel came loose, and there was a fuel injection problem.
• At a press launch, a Dutch journalist veered off the road (incoming Verstappen jokes…) due to the suspension falling apart
• At Goodwood, the throttle stuck open. Not good when you have 575 horsepower.

Not only that, the car was found to be virtually unmanageable at low speeds. Clarkson remarked that the car was incredibly aero-reliant, which means when you aren’t going fast enough to generate much downforce, you have very little grip. It couldn’t decide whether to oversteer or understeer. He said that it would be a good excuse for a policeman since “he has to take that corner at a thousand miles per hour because if he takes it at thirty, he’ll crash”.

It was also an utter commercial flop. They aimed to sell 25 per year, but from what I’ve seen, they haven’t even managed to sell 25 in total. This is nowhere near enough to cover development costs, especially since many of their engineers had previously worked on the McLaren F1 and were probably very expensive to hire.

The end?

In November 2015, Angad Paul, the CEO of Caparo (the parent company of Caparo Vehicle Technolgies) was found dead after falling from his 8th-floor penthouse. The company was in deep financial trouble, and it was thought that this drove him to suicide. At this point, it seemed like the T1 had died with him.

Or is it?

In 2014, there were talks of a Caparo T1 Evolution with over 700hp, but those seemed to dissolve. However, in 2017 Evo released more articles about the supposedly upcoming T1 Evolution. It’s difficult to tell if these are just hot air. Also you have to remember that Evo praised the T1 significantly more than any other reviewer. With the likes of the Project One and Valkyrie coming out, I really want this to happen as it’d be pretty much the only compareable car for track performance, and probably cheaper as well.

I hope you enjoyed reading! The “Blog” section of this website seems to have gone a little downhill so I thought I’d inject a little more life into it.