Ascari A10

Paul Brown, who had designed for the Zakspeed Formula 1 team, drew the KZ1 and then reworked it into the A10, and the family resemblance is total: 4,300mm long, 1,852mm wide and 1,138mm tall, dimensions the two cars share exactly. What changed is what a race car needs. The A10 is the more aggressive object, with the aerodynamic hardware and cooling arrangements of the KZ1-R rather than the smoother surfacing of the road car, and it looks like what it is: a GT racer with numberplates, wearing its downforce on the outside. The badge is worth a moment. Ascari Cars named itself after Alberto Ascari, the Italian who took the 1952 and 1953 Formula 1 titles, and Zwart named the KZ1 after himself, so the marque carries a double dedication that is either charming or awkward depending on your view of Dutch oil money in British motorsport. The A10 name is the most modest thing on the car, marking ten years of a company that would be bankrupt within four more.

The A10 never raced, and that is the wrong way round for this car: it is a race car that was made to stop racing. It was developed directly from the Ascari KZ1-R, which competed in the Spanish GT Championship and the FIA GT3 European Championship, and the road car exists because Ascari wanted to sell fifty copies of that machine with lights and numberplates. The company behind it was built on competition. Klaas Zwart finished third in the British GT Championship in 1995, won the EuroBOSS series in 2003, 2006 and 2007, and built Circuito Ascari near Ronda in Spain, a 5.4km private circuit with 26 corners drawn from Spa, Silverstone and the Nurburgring, completed in 2003. Ascari customers were offered access to it, which is a rare thing for a firm of this size to be able to promise. So the A10's competition record is entirely inherited, and its only recorded competitive performance is a timed lap for a television programme. Given that lap beat every supercar that had been round that circuit, the inheritance was clearly worth something.

The A10's entire public life is one lap. On the 9 December 2007 episode of Top Gear it went round the show's test track in 1:17.3, three tenths quicker than the modified Koenigsegg CCX that held the record, and became the fastest car the programme had timed. For a company most viewers had never heard of, that was as much publicity as a small British manufacturer has ever bought for the price of a track day. The lap has aged the way all lap records do. Wikipedia notes the A10 still sat 21st on the all-time Power Lap board as of 2023, which is a respectable afterlife for a car built once, in 2006. Everything else about the marque's public profile belongs to the circuit rather than the cars. Circuito Ascari at Ronda outlived Ascari Cars by more than a decade and remains a fixture on the private-track circuit, sold by Zwart in 2022. The car company is a footnote; the racetrack is the monument.

Nobody owns an A10 except its builder, so the honest version of this section is what the car would ask of anyone who did. The BMW S62 is the friendliest part: it is the M5 engine, it has a large specialist following, and its service intervals and weak points are well understood by people who have never seen an Ascari. Everything else is competition equipment on a road-registered car. A sequential gearbox wears to a schedule and is rebuilt rather than repaired. Race-derived suspension, brakes and aerodynamic components were specified for track use, and their consumable life is measured in sessions. The company has been gone since 2010, so there is no factory to call, no parts department and no build records to request. What survives is the small group of people who worked on the KZ1 and KZ1-R programmes in Banbury, and the owners of those cars, who face the same problems. For a single prototype in a private collection, the real risk is not wear, it is disuse. Race hardware left standing deteriorates faster than it does being used.