Overrated: TVR Cerbera

It felt like a magnificent kind of car when it first appeared, did the TVR Cerbera. It was long and low and wide, and to begin with powered by a mildly detuned version of the flat crank V8 that propelled TVR’s racing Tuscans of that era, the late 1990s. And back in the day I was lucky enough to have one of each for a few memorable months.

As a factory driver for the TVR race team in 1998 I was given a 450bhp Tuscan race car to compete in at the weekends, plus a shiny new Cerbera to mess about with on the road. For an all-too brief period – and for fairly obvious reasons – it felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.

The Tuscan race car was an immense machine, as quick as a BTCC car at some circuits (quicker at the faster ones) but in its way the Cerbera was even more memorable – because there really was nothing else like it. Peter Wheeler’s philosophy was a simple one at heart: he thought that if his cars looked good, sounded good, went well and didn’t cost silly money – as he would say – then they’d be hard to resist.