Arash Car 2011

Arash Car 2011

 Arash Car 2011

Britain has a long history of niche car makers. Many have come and gone over the years, swallowed up by bigger companies or fallen by the wayside, the victims of hope over reality. But many survive and bring much needed individualism to an increasingly corporate motoring world. Manufacturers such as Noble, Westfield, Marcos, Ascari and Ariel manage to bring us exciting and interesting cars. And you can now add to the list Arash Cars.

Arash Cars is the brainchild of Arash Farboud, a wealthy petrol-head and CEO of Unisurge, a Pharmacuticals company, based in Sawston, Cambridge. He started out his car building journey with Farboud Cars, which planned on making a road-going race car on the lines of the 911 GT1. But a watering-down of that original concept led to the creation of Arash Cars, and the AF-10 is the first fruits of that endeavour.

Stunning looks, combined with reliable power from the Corvette 7.0 Litre engine from the ZR0 (suitably tweaked) is a great starting point for a reliable ‘exotic’, with around 550bhp and a 0-60 a shade over 3 seconds. A Carbon Fibre chassis, a Graziano gearbox (manual, unlike the similar ‘box in the Enzo) and a weight of around 1200kg all add to the package. Add to that some very clever trick wings for enhanced handling, and with prices from around £170k you’re looking at a car to rival the Koenigseggs and Zondas of this world at less than half the price. Production numbers are likely to be a maximum of 25 cars a year, so this is going to be a very rare beast.

Well, no it’s not, but it will be by the summer of ’09. And there are more cars in the pipeline. An ‘S’ version sporting the engine from the ZR1 is planned as soon as that engine becomes available (probably a year later), and a smaller AF-8 is also planned.

Will the AF-10 be a success? It’s a very fair question. The economy is on its knees and there’s lots of competition out there. Price-wise its very competetive, and it looks great and should perform remarkably well. And it is fair to say that Arash Farboud is not a man used to failure. So it has a real fighting chance. And that is great. We need more individual cars like this. There’s lots to be said for the corporate monsters, but it’s wonderful that even in this day and age supercar makers like Koenigsegg and Pagani have been successfull. Here’s hoping that Arash joins the club.