Mosler MT900

Rod Trenne drew a shape that answers to the wind tunnel and the tape measure rather than to fashion. The MT900 is 1,130mm tall, 4,801mm long and 2,007mm wide, which gives it the flat, splayed look of a prototype racer rather than a road car, and the proportions are dictated by the mid-mounted V8 and the aerodynamic package rather than by any styling theme. The details that stand out are functional. Butterfly doors, because getting into a car this low over a wide sill needs the opening. A long, low nose feeding air over and under the car. A cabin pushed well forward. No ornament anywhere, no badges beyond the necessary, no attempt to look expensive. The name is the most honest piece of design language on it. MT900 records the two people who made the car and the weight they were aiming at, and the fact that the production road car landed within 100kg of that target after being made street legal is the best summary of the design brief that exists.

This is a car that raced more than it was driven, which is unusual and entirely intentional: around fifty of the roughly eighty-five built were competition chassis. The MT900R debuted at the 2001 Daytona 24 Hours and became a fixture in the Grand American series. The headline result came in 2003, when the number 24 Mosler of Perspective Racing, driven by Jerome Policand, Michel Neugarten, Joao Barbosa and Andy Wallace, won the GTS class at the Rolex 24 at Daytona and finished ninth overall. The same year Rollcentre Racing and Balfe Motorsport took the car to Europe and opened the British GT season with three consecutive one-two finishes, Rollcentre taking the title; a Mosler also finished fifth in the Bathurst 24 Hour. Balfe won the Spanish GT drivers' championship in 2004 by a single point. Then the paperwork caught up. Balfe ran the 2005 FIA GT season without homologation and could not score, and in late 2006 the FIA refused Rollcentre's MT900 GT3 homologation because too few road cars existed. The last chapter was Japanese: the Judd-powered MT900M in Super GT in 2010 and 2011. Warren Mosler's first car had been banned by IMSA for winning too much, so the family knew the feeling.

Mosler cars have always attracted a particular kind of attention, and the man is a large part of it. Warren Mosler is better known outside the car world as one of the founders of modern monetary theory, which makes him the only supercar constructor whose Wikipedia arguments are mostly about government deficits. The MT900's most-repeated fact is its first customer: George Lucas took delivery of the first street-legal MT900S in December 2006, which is a satisfying pairing for a car that looks like it was drawn for a chase through a canyon. Its widest audience came through games. The MT900S is in Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 and in Forza Horizon 4 and 5, and the MT900 GT3 has appeared in the series as well, so a generation of players has driven a Mosler without ever seeing one. That is the usual fate of a car built in these numbers, and in this case it is the main reason the name is recognised at all outside American club racing paddocks.

Ownership is split neatly between the easy half and the specialist half. The drivetrain is the easy half: an LS V8 and a ZF six-speed of the kind used in the 911 mean that servicing, tuning and even a full engine replacement are ordinary transactions at ordinary prices, which is not something owners of any European rival can say. The specialist half is everything Mosler made. The composite structure, panels, glass and interior were produced in tiny numbers by a company that no longer exists, so damage repair means finding someone who understands composite tubs and is willing to work without factory documentation. Living with it is a race car compromise. It is noisy, the ride is firm, the cabin is hot and the visibility is a race car's. Owners who use them talk about them the way people talk about a track car that happens to be registered, and the ones that have been converted to track-only use tend to stay that way. The reward is that very little goes wrong mechanically, because there is very little there to go wrong.