2012 Ariel Atom 700
Merit Partners is pleased to present this awe-inspiring Ariel Atom 700, a one of one car with 700 hp. We have gotten a lot of crazy and fun cars to drive here at Merit but this car takes the prize for most extreme performance car. The short story is that if you are looking for performance per dollar spent, there is no better car in the world than this Ariel and the most amazing thing is that it is street legal. What we can say after driving the car is that it is far more drivable than one might expect with this kind of hp/weight ratio. When not putting your foot in it, the car drives just like a 911 turbo with a smooth and direct gearbox without any jerkiness associated with big performance cars like this one, that was one of the most surprising and refreshing things to us was the overall drivability of the car. All that being said, when you do begin to dip into the boost on the car, it is cartoonish fast and like nothing we have ever driven. Amazingly, it hooks up as well with the wider Toyo R888’s showing almost not wheel slip when warm.
As far as background on the car, it was acquired by a local client of ours and has a brand new engine in it with break in miles. The car has never been driven on the track and has a number of options that are nice upgrades like the all leather Recaro seats that are not longer available and much nicer than standard Atom seats. There are liberal carbon fiber pieces like the custom carbon fenders and trim. The owner put an additional lighting package on the car and it does have a rollbar not currently on the car that can be mounted for additional protection whether on the track or street. The car is based on the Ariel Atom 2 and uses a 2.0L Ford Ecotec engine as the base. DDMWorks did the conversion and put a supercharger and a turbo on the engine to produce 700hp, which produces an astonishing 350hp/liter. Even with the amazing power per liter, the twin charged engine offers great low end reasons with high end power, all from just 2.0L of displacement. To accomplish this amount of power per liter safely, extensive modification are done to the stock Ecotec 2.0L. The engine is fitted with many upgrades in eluding Darton Mid sleeves, custom ceramic coated Wiseco pistons, H-beam Carrillo connecting rods and ARP hardware. The the original M62 supercharge is re-installed along with a Garrett GTX 3076 turbocharge to supply the airflow required to reach the 700hp goal. Fueling is supplied by 1100cc injectors and a massive Aeromotive 1000 fuel pump. A custom air-to-water heat exchanger is used to cool the supercharge output along with a gigantic air-to-air intercooler in the rear to cool the air from the turbo, both units custom made for the conversion by Griffin Thermal Products. The conversion uses a pair of boost controllers to control the boost feeding the engine from the supercharger and turbo. One of the controllers is hooked up to a Trial MV-R water cooled waste gate to keep the turbo boost at 35psi on high boost. A second boost controller is used to turn the supercharger off once the turbo pressure exceeds the opus of the supercharger, increasing efficiency an allowing more power to get the ground. Exhaust, intercooler tubing and tubular exhaust manifold are all custom made in house by DDMWork’s talented fabricators and fitted to the car by hand, thank finished off with ceramic coating. Final custom tuning of the ECM and boost controller is also done in house on our load bearing Dynocom dyno to verify the 700hp before delivery. To handle the power of the conversion, 225mm wide Toyo R888’s are mounted on custom 16×7 wheels up front and 275mm R888’s mounted on custom 17×9 wheels in the rear. The end result is the 1450 pound Ariel Atom 700 achieves a power to weight ratio that exceeds every production car with only 2.07 pounds per horsepower! Along with this amazing power to weight, the power is selectable by the driver while driving, with 3 selectable power levels of 450, 575 and 700hp. The Ariel runs on 93 octane fuel and is easily serviceable by most performance shops.
It comes with clean title and complete service records, verified dyno sheet and all build details. If you want to blow away most every supercar in the world, this is the car and it is surprisingly comfortable as well. No test drives are permitted on this car but we can assure any perspective buyer that he will not be disappointed.
