WHO KNEW ALL THAT WAS GOING ON behind the dashboard in the Honda Civic Type R? All that energy, that sound, that violence… The 2-litre four-cylinder turbo engine behind my shoulders is emitting all kinds of whoops and squawks, trills and flutters, like an entire aviary’s been ingested through the airbox. Actually, given the rate it’s propelling the Atom down the road, and the intense whooshing sound it makes as the turbo spools up, I wonder if Ariel might actually have swapped it for a jet engine.
In the already-rapid Honda hot hatch it’s sourced from, the 2-litre four turns out 324bhp. Installed in the regular Ariel Atom 4 (it seems wrong to use the word ‘regular’ for such a gloriously irregular car), which replaced the Atom 3.5 in 2020, it’s rated at 320bhp. The Atom 4R has 400bhp. As tested, it weighs 665kg.
Without the extra weight of a large hatchback’s shell, seats and so on for the engine to carry – and the windscreen and firewall to contain its library of sound effects – and with an 80bhp shot in the arm, it comes as no surprise that the Atom 4R is Quite Brisk. But what’s about to become clear, as we get to know it properly over a mix of roads in remote, rolling countryside, is that interstellar-level straight-line urge is only
