Farbio GTS

First impressions

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Is it the new Lotus Eagle? Nope. The much rumoured baby McLaren then? Wrong again. I know - it's that Farboud thing from Project Gotham Racing! Mmm, kind of... Now engineered into production reality, millionaire car nut Arash Farboud's ambitious plan to build a Porsche and Ferrari slaying supercar of his own design has evolved into this, the Farbio GTS. With Farboud now off and indulging his fantasies in new projects the name change underlines quite how much the car has changed since it was first seen in 2004. Let's start from the top. Or actually the bottom...

Farboud's orginal design looked very similar but used an expensive aluminium chassis, F1-style pushrod suspension and a twin-turbo V6 from the first generation Audi RS4. With Ferrari and Porsche in its sights the car was expected to cost north of £100,000 and boast suitably bonkers performance. But when ex-Marcos man Chris Marsh took the project on he realised making the car into a viable production vehicle would require some serious rethinking and a more real world pricetag of £60,000. The finished product looks very similar to the Farboud but uses a much more cost effective steel space frame and carbon body combination, conventional double wishbone suspension and a Ford 3.0-litre V6 engine.
Performance

In the classic mould of small-scale British sports car builders Farbio follows the mantra of less is more. And by making the Farbio as light as possible it has been able to avoid spending lots of money on an expensive and complicated engine to give the necessary performance. As such the Ford V6's 262bhp is good enough to deliver ballistic pace. Extensive use of carbon fibre - all the bodywork is made from the stuff - means a kerbweight of just 1,048kg. That's a couple of hundred kilos more than an Elise but still significantly less than most hot hatches - even a supposedly minimalist Renault Clio 197 Cup weighs around 1,200kg.