The Ariel Atom 2 is by far the most committed track car here. In his quest for lightness and speed, the Atom's designer, Simon Saunders, left out the doors, the windshield, the top, and even a sheetmetal skin. It's like a two-seat formula car, and as the smallest and lightest in this group, it was the quickest by a wide margin—it catapulted to 60 mph in 3.0 seconds and was the fastest around the racetrack by almost two seconds.The Atom's speed comes with a generous dollop of styling, as there are interesting details everywhere the eye falls. The signature element is the powder-coated steel-tube frame and its devilishly graceful curves that join the front and rear ends. It's the automotive version of Nike's swoosh.
"Everyone wants to touch it," remarked Tom Smurzynski. The car, that is. He's from Brammo Motorsports, the North American builder of the Atom. Although the car was created in England about seven years ago, most of the construction for North American Atoms is done at the Brammo shop in Ashland, Oregon. Those gorgeous steel tubes are precisely shaped in an automated CNC tube bender. Brammo also fabricates the suspension, the carbon-fiber fenders, and the fiberglass floor pan. There are enough changes over the original that Brammo has christened its car the "Atom 2." A base model starts at $41,995, and ours ran almost 60 grand.Mounted in the rear are the supercharged four-cylinder engine and five-speed manual transmission from a Chevy Cobalt SS. The engine is available in various horsepower levels, from 205 to 300. Ours had the 245-hp Stage 2 package.
Although we've never favorably compared the Cobalt engine's noise and vibration characteristics with a Honda engine's, the Chevy engine works fantastically in the Atom. The driver feels little vibration, which is likely thanks to the engine's balance shafts. The combination of supercharger whine and rorty exhaust is satisfyingly sporty.
There's so much low-end grunt that around Buttonwillow we rarely dipped below third gear. The Atom pulled fiercely at all rpm and could invoke massive wheelspin at will. Although the gearbox action is light, direct, and far slicker here than in a Cobalt, we were glad not to have to shift often. Things happen at warp speed in the Atom—straights evaporate, braking zones seemingly last only a few yards, and the corners feel as if you were in a centrifuge. We're used to far lazier responses than the Atom's, and we all had difficulty keeping up, which made some of us call the Ariel "nervous and twitchy."We simply needed to acclimate. The Atom does what it's told, but you have to be damn quick and sure with your instructions. Once that was settled, we had joyous fun, passing the Z06 as if it were a minivan.
Outright speed is only one of the Atom's charms. Others—including watching the front suspension move, feeling the wind crawl up your pant legs and assault your noggin—could just as easily be called annoyances, depending on your frame of mind. This car, however, draws attention. The owner of our test car only uses it for track days and thus had not registered it for street use (we only drove it on the track), but we can easily imagine the stares it would elicit on public roads. In an ever more homogenized automotive landscape, there's nothing else like the Atom.
