TVR returns with new V8 sports car

Iconic British sports car firm TVR is set to return, revealed UK outlet Autocar yesterday.

TVR disappeared almost a decade ago, after Russian entrepreneur Nikolai Smolenski bought the outfit from Peter Wheeler, under whom the brand thrived producing cars like the Griffith, Chimaera, Tuscan and Sagaris.

The brand's presence in Australia has been limited to a handful of private imports, and normally we wouldn't dedicate too much time and effort to its re-emergence.

However, there's one crucial bit of information that makes us potentially very excited about these new TVRs - the engineering has been outsourced to Gordon Murray Design.

As most enthusiasts know, Gordon Murray was the man behind the McLaren F1 supercar, which we named the greatest performance car of all time.

He also has the most successful F1 car of all time (McLaren MP4/4), most powerful F1 car of all time (Brabham BT55) and arguably the most innovative F1 car of all time (Brabham BT46 'fan car') on his resume.

Recently, Murray has been working on revolutionising the way cars are made with his 'iStream' process, and TVR's yet-to-be-named new model will be the first production car to be built using this process.

Abandoning conventional construction, iStream builds cars by using a spaceframe of large diameter, thin-walled steel tubing, connected by composite panels.

The resulting body is meant to be extremely light, extremely stiff and much cheaper to build than established methods, with this new TVR aiming for a 1100kg kerb weight.

Providing ample performance will be a Cosworth-developed V8 producing around 330kW, for a sub-4sec 0-100km/h time.

Far more exciting than the bald numbers, however, is the prospect of Murray sinking his teeth into another performance car project.

While not all his ideas work, he has far more hits than misses and his belief that pleasing the driver is the ultimate goal with any sports car means this new V8 rear-drive coupe could have us booking flights to Blighty when it's released in 2017.

For more details on the project visit Autocar's original story here.

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