Factor in the back story, the audacity of the idea, the thousands of man hours to build it, the OCD fit and finish, the depth of character that continues to reveal itself the more you drive and the love that spills out of it, and you're left with something very special indeed. The specs are nothing special, but the overall taste is. This is a carbon fibre, two-seat coupe with a four-cylinder turbo in its freakishly clean engine bay. I ate grilled lettuce covered in a mystery sauce at a South African restaurant once, and let me tell you it was transcendental. In my book, the mark of truly great food is taking the simplest of ingredients and making them sing. Plus, “it would have been 1,500kg", Bååth reminds us. “This is a time capsule of everything up until now, electric comes next.” Not because we don’t like EVs, but because a car that’s a homage to the past deserves to represent it in all its fuel-belching glory. When we discovered it wasn’t, joy was universal in the Top Gear office. When we first saw pictures of this car, and had taken a quiet moment in the corner to regroup, we all assumed it would be electric. You can forget your stopwatch and just enjoy a bit of built-in squish, the natural movement of the car through your buttocks and that old-school analogue feel despite a new-school tolerance to abuse. What you get then is a neat road/track compromise – soft enough to enjoy on the public highway, fast and interactive enough to keep even the handiest of hands happy on track. This could have so easily been a racecar with a numberplate wearing a nostalgic hat - banging in lap times is Cyan’s speciality, after all - but Bååth says he fought hard to ringfence the fun. Cyan calls it “an authentic rear-wheel-drive experience,” we call it an OAP with bionic hips and a repeat prescription for adrenalin. But stick at it and the car begins to embrace you, you start to trust the rapid power-assisted steering, learn that the brakes like to be mashed, that a little or a large slide here and there is how it likes to be handled. I’m constantly aware that there’s moisture on the surface, no electronics to mask my talent deficiencies, luxury houses that cost less and currently only one of these in the world. Hold onto the gears though and you’re properly shifting by the time you’ve slid down the dogleg-pattern 'box into third. Ooof, it hits hard… undeniably turbocharged, but the boost doesn’t arrive in one dump, it’s fed in smoothly and makes chasing the redline worth it. ![]() It demands no more of the driver to operate than a diesel XC40… unless you choose to poke it with a stick, or in this case a battered size-nine running shoe. ![]() Dip the clutch, grab the spindly but rigid gearlever, mind the high-biting point and you’re rolling. Sorry, but this is a car that sounds better from the outside than in - passers-by, you’re in for a treat on more than one level. ![]() If it rains, you’ve got a one-in-six chance of finding the wipers.įire the engine and there’s a woofly but monotone idle, give it some revs and you get the odd detonation on the overrun. Door open, step over the roll cage and descend into a world of black leather, itchy-looking Scandi-cool grey fabric, chrome dials and switchgear engraved in Swedish.
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