SUPERVAN! REMEMBER

Clarkson’s V8 blender? No idea why that didn’t catch on, because at its core the idea was sheer perfection. Souping up any mechanical device with a lot more power than it strictly requires is always going to have joyous results and get two thumbs up from TopGear. Or two thumbs off in the case of Clarkson’s Corvette Magimix. Take the Dodge 8300 Tomahawk from 2003, a motorbike powered by an 8.3-litre Viper V10, nothing wrong with that. How about the 24-litre aero-engined Napier-Railton that’s broken 47 separate land speed records, or Jonny Smith’s 800+bhp Enfield 8000 EV conversion capable of sub-10secs quarter miles? You see, it’s a formula that works.

Especially when the chassis’s top hat is as inappropriate as possible. Pick something that has no business going quickly, make it fast enough to bring supercars out in a cold sweat… and you’re onto a winner. And so it was in the early Seventies, in a small room in Dagenham full of flares, perms and cigarette fog, that the idea for Supervan was born. Its mission was clear: to combine the unmistakable box-on-wheels body of the Transit, with the performance of a full-on racing car, thus creating the mother of all promo