CarBrandLogos archive · TVR · 1996

TVRCerbera

When Blackpool stopped buying engines and started casting its own.

Photo: Huhu Uet · CC BY 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in TVR history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the TVR Cerbera, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Every TVR up to this point had used somebody else's engine — Ford, Triumph, MG, Rover. Peter Wheeler decided that a company charging supercar money should not be dependent on a V8 designed by Buick in the early 1960s, and commissioned one of its own.

Tvr.cerbera.arp · Arpingstone · Public domain

TVR Cerbera Speed Six - Flickr - The Car Spy

Design and engineering

The result was the AJP8, named for Al Melling, John Ravenscroft and Wheeler himself: an all-aluminium V8 with a flat-plane crankshaft, initially 4.2 litres and later stretched to 4.5 and 4.7. It sounded like nothing else on the road and made the Cerbera, launched in 1996, TVR's first genuinely self-sufficient car. From 1999 the alternative was the Speed Six, a 4.0-litre straight six developed in-house and later used across the range.

TVR Cerbera Speed Six - Flickr - The Car Spy · The Car Spy · CC BY 2.0

In production

The body, by Damian McTaggart, was the company's first fixed-head coupe since the wedge cars, with two small rear seats staggered to give the passenger legroom and a dashboard where the instruments sat in front of the driver in a single moulded binnacle. Doors opened via a button hidden under the mirror. There was still no traction control.

1997 TVR Cerbera Speed Six 4.2 Rear · Vauxford · CC BY-SA 4.0

Legacy

The engine programme also produced the Speed Twelve, a 7.7-litre project intended for GT racing and briefly for the road, which Wheeler is said to have abandoned as a road car after driving a prototype. Around 1,500 Cerberas were built up to 2006 — the model that proved TVR could engineer as well as assemble, and which also gave it a reliability reputation it never fully escaped.

At a glance

The facts that define it.

Units built

1,490

Engine

4.0 L TVR Speed Six engine

Designer

Damian McTaggart

Body

2-door 2+2 coupé

Technical specification

The Cerbera, in detail.

Production: 1996–2006; 1,490 produced
Class: Sports car (S)
Body style: 2-door 2+2 coupé
Layout: Front mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive
Engine: 4.0 L TVR Speed Six engine; Speed Six Straight-six engine; I6 ; 4.2 L TVR Speed Eight engine; Speed Eight (AJP8) V8 engine; V8 ; 4.5 L TVR Speed Eight engine; Speed Eight (AJP8) V8 ; 4.7 L TVR Speed Eight engine; Speed E
Transmission: 5-speed manual
Designer: Damian McTaggart
Assembly: United Kingdom: Blackpool, England
Manufacturer: TVR