Zenvo TS1 GT

Christian Brandt drew both the ST1 and the TS1 GT, and the family resemblance is deliberate rather than a shortcut: Zenvo kept the shape because the shape was not the problem. What changed is detail and stance. The TS1 GT is 4,680 mm long and 2,155 mm wide over only 1,198 mm of height, which is unusually wide relative to its length and gives the car a planted, short-nosed look that reads as more purposeful than elegant. Forged aluminium wheels sit 19 inches at the front and 20 at the rear under 265 and 345 section Michelins, a wide rear track being the other half of the same idea. Inside, the dashboard and console are carbon and Alcantara with carbon bucket seats, twin displays and Alpine audio, which was Zenvo's answer to the specific criticism the ST1 had attracted. The design signature most people know actually belongs to a later car in the family: the TSR-S rear wing that rotates on two axes to brake and to stabilise. It came in 2018, after this car, and it remains the most original piece of design Zenvo has produced.

Zenvo has never entered a race, and unlike most low-volume makers it never claimed it would. There is no competition department, no customer racing programme and no series that a 1,104 hp rear-drive car of this weight fits into without being rebuilt. The TSR variant is track-only, but track-only and racing are different things: it was built for owners to use on circuit, not to be homologated into a class. The closest the marque has come to competition is uncomfortable and worth stating honestly, because it is the reason the fire story stuck. A 2010 ST1 development car appeared at the 2015 Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix giving charity rides in support of a Danish children's hospital programme, and caught fire, which Zenvo attributed to fuel lines. For a firm whose reputation was already bound up with one fire in front of a television audience, a second one at a public event mattered. What Zenvo did instead of racing was engineering, and the TSR-S wing that followed in 2018 is the better answer to what the company can do.

The Top Gear episode is the reason most people have heard of Zenvo and it deserves stating as fact rather than as a punchline. Series 21, episode 3, first broadcast on 16 February 2014, with Jeremy Clarkson presenting. The car was an ST1, not this one. It failed twice: the rear brakes were not working properly and the clutch let go, and after repairs and a return to Dunsfold for a second day of filming, a faulty intercooler fan caught fire. Zenvo published a response saying the fan had failed after more than an hour of intensive high-speed testing and fifty litres of fuel, and traced the defect to a fan supplied by an established automotive supplier. The Stig's lap was set in the wet and was slower than ordinary fast saloons had managed in similar conditions, though the accounts of exactly which car it was compared to disagree and this page does not adjudicate that. The episode did lasting damage, and the TS1 GT of 2016 is the direct answer to it. That is why it exists, and it is a reasonable measure of how well Zenvo answered.

Low mileage is the defining ownership fact. These cars are almost never used, and the problems that follow are the problems of disuse rather than wear: fluids that have sat, seals that have dried, tyres that are older than their tread depth suggests, and batteries that have been through more deep discharges than the car has heat cycles. Get a car properly recommissioned rather than simply started. Cooling deserves specific attention, not because the TS1 GT has a fire record of its own, which it does not, but because both of the ST1 incidents that shaped the marque's reputation were cooling and fuel system failures on the closely related earlier car, and it is the system a buyer should want documented. The twin-supercharged V8 is more forgiving to live with than a turbocharged equivalent, running less heat soak and less complexity in the induction side. The dual-clutch with dog gears is loud and abrupt at low speed by design. Everything about the car is hand-built at Præstø by a small team, which means excellent detail work and long waits for anything that needs remaking.