FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS EVO has run a regular page called DOA – Dead On Arrival – telling the stories behind interesting cars that were culled before they could reach production. In the creation of this series there’s always been a North Star, a car in the evo universe that typified the kind of interesting, implausible, almost showroom-ready project on which DOA feasted, and here it is: the TVR Cerbera Speed 12. This is a car that seemed to deserve more than a single page and so, with DOA at the end of its run, we finish the series with a look back at the greatest and craziest pre-doomed production car in history.
The Speed 12 began life in the mid-1990s and kicked off, as many things did at TVR, with an argument. In this case, it was a spirited debate about engines between boss man Peter Wheeler and engineer John Ravenscroft, which started with the cylinder heads of the forthcoming in-house Speed Six engine and ended, somehow, with TVR deciding to make a V12. This wasn’t a piece of abstract madness, much though many TVR decisions seemed otherwise, because Wheeler had noticed the success of the McLaren F1 in GT racing and wanted
