Alongside the Atom, Ariel offer the Nomad , a bare-bones off-roader that looks Dakar-ready. Using a slightly detuned version of supercharged-K24 engine found in the Atom 3. Skip to Content Skip to Footer.
Find a car review Make Make. Model Model. Reviews Home Ariel Atom. Evo rating. What is it? More reviews. Reviews Ariel Atom 4 review - Britain's exoskeletal track toy just got torquier Engine In-line 4-cyl, cc, supercharged Max power bhp rpm Max torque lb ft rpm 2. Share this on Twitter Share this on Facebook Email. More on Atom convertible. Ariel Atom V8 scale model perfectly recreates bhp car. Ariel Atom convertible.
Ariel Atom 3S. The Atom 3 gets a turbocharger and bhp in its new US-focused 3S guise. Ariel Atom 3. Ariel has announced the even more hardcore Atom model, called the 3. We drive it on a soaking wet Bedford Autodrome. Appreciating assets that are rarely appreciated, because if you drive them hard or far they stop generating cash and start costing you a ton of money. As we pointed out a couple of years ago, the Ariel is a true people's champion that routinely trots out on the racetrack and stuffs steaming helpings of humble pie into the gobs of cars costing 10, 20 or 30 times as much.
If you want a status symbol, go get yourself a Koenigsegg or a Pagani. If you want the quickest and best-handling genuine driver's scalpel, pick up an Atom. Then spend the million-odd pounds you just saved on track days and driving coaches and promptly run out of excuses for your lap times. Now, as we wait for its brutal electric Ariel Hipercar to drop, the British company has announced the next-generation Atom 4, which takes this wild naked warrior to new heights.
It starts with the engine — the latest Honda Type R donk. This 2. But the real story here is torque, which at Nm lb-ft is a flatly terrifying 75 percent leap up from the naturally aspirated Atom 3. It's housed in a new bronze-welded chassis, which keeps the familiar exosleketal shape of previous Atom bodies but offers some 15 percent extra torsional stiffness as well as improved interior space, leg room and crash protection.
Even the first-generation Atom was praised for its astonishing ability to stay flat under extreme track braking and cornering forces, but the Atom 4 gets a completely overhauled suspension system designed to manage acceleration squat, brake dive and cornering roll even better.
Bilstein provides the dampers, but there's also an optional semi-active Ohlins pack in the works. A redesigned steering rack adds extra turning lock and improves road usability and ease of parking, but you can also choose to specify an extra quick steering rack if you plan to do most of your miles on the racetrack.
The truly enthusiastic can up-spec the Atom 4 with full carbon rims, saving some 16 kg 35 lb of unsprung weight across the car.
To handle the extra power, the brakes get an upgrade as well, to mm 2-piston vented fronts and mm rears, and there's also an upgrade kit available that takes you up to mm AP Racing discs all round, with alloy 4-piston calipers. You can also choose to option up with a dial in the cockpit that lets you adjust brake bias between the front and rear wheels for fine tuning.
It might be an open-top face melter, but the Atom's bodywork has been completely overhauled in search of superior aerodynamics. The results include a decrease in drag, extra downforce to help with high-speed cornering, and much better air delivery to the radiator, intercooler and engine air intakes.
The rollover protection hoop is now invisible under a cowl that covers the main air intake next to the driver's head, and a tiny "aero screen" abruptly forces air up over the driver's head, helping to minimize helmet lift and channel air toward that center intake.
Most of the bodywork can be optioned up to carbon fiber if the standard weight of kg 1, lb is too lardy for you. If it's you that's lardy and not the car, the cabin has been widened by 20 mm and lengthened by 50 mm to "accommodate the very widest range of users.
The lighting has been revised, with LED indicators, stop lights and taillights, daytime running lamps and halogen headlights with auto lighting capability. The tiny luggage cubby is a little less tiny, and the switchgear and instruments are new, with a full color AIM TFT screen, programmable shift lights and a track datalogger.
Launch control and traction control are now options. Deliveries will start in the British spring of In terms of sheer, raw driving experience, there's very little outside the kit car and track special world that comes close to what this thing offers. It's great to see Ariel continuing to punch way above its weight. Keep swinging, guys! The Atom's story actually began nearly a decade earlier when the car's creator and then-university student, Niki Smart, designed the lightweight sports car in Since then, the Atom has become a great success in its small niche of the automotive market.
Entering production in , the Ariel Motor Company's flagship offering has seen no less than eight different iterations, all remarkable for their radical designs that look more like a Formula One car than something that belongs on public roads. The latest model of the Ariel Atom is the Atom 4. Introduced in at, quite fittingly, the Goodwood Festival of Speed, the Atom 4 takes everything great about the small, Spartan, amazingly road-legal versions that came before it and doubles down on the insanity.
With its feather-weight and full-sized powerplant, the Atom 4 is the perfect combination of speed and agility in a platform that offers a driving experience like no other. The Atom 4 features a stripped-down body familiar to those who have seen previous generations of the car.
For this latest model, though, the chassis features an all-new steel tube design. In fact, according to Autocar , the only holdovers from the previous Atom are the fuel filler cap and the pedals. Ariel says that things are a little more spacious inside the car than they have been previously, but the whole package is still small.
There are two main reasons for this: cost and performance. Eliminating extraneous components like doors, a roof, and a trunk means eliminating expenses during production, which helps bring down the price for the end consumer.
Without the need to sculpt the body around extra parts, aerodynamic considerations can also play a larger role in design and the Ariel Atom achieves an impressively low drag coefficient.
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