Between you and me, I haven’t thought much about the TVR Cerbera since playing Gran Turismo 4 in high school. That’s unfortunate, both because the Cerbera was sort of like England’s answer to the Dodge Viper, and because it happened to play an important role in the development of a far more famous two-door super coupe: the Mercedes SLR McLaren.
According to TVR Blog, Mercedes and McLaren used a pair of TVR Cerbera test mules to develop the engine for the SLR. The hand-built 5.5-liter supercharged V8 came from AMG, so it wasn’t exactly new to the team. Rather, the big question mark was the motor’s position—it was set so far back behind the front axle that the SLR was technically mid-engined. Due to this and the supercar’s massive front end, an enormous front intake was necessary. Engineers needed a test vehicle with an appropriately long hood, both for overall proportional parity and to refine the intake, and such a car didn’t exist in Mercedes’ repertoire at the time the SLR was in the works.
That’s supposedly where the Cerbera came in. It seemed like the SLR’s perfect counterpart, with its long nose and big V8 also mounted far back behind the front axle. You can see the Cerbera’s modified hood in photos, with a massive rhino horn-like bump, to accommodate the AMG engine and intake. It’s unclear if any other changes were made to the Cerbera development cars, as Mercedes reportedly keeps these prototypes locked up in Stuttgart somewhere, per TVR Blog, and never publicized any information about them. However, there seems to be a photo from the SLR’s official art book that shows the Silver Arrows flagship next to development mules, two of which are different Cerberas. The Drive reached out to Mercedes-Benz for official details and will update this story should we get any.
The SLR McLaren is one of the most unusual performance cars of this century. Its development was led by Gordon Murray, a man known for lightweight, mid-engine, naturally aspirated sports cars. And yet, the SLR was heavy, luxurious, and supercharged. (Sure, that V8 was technically between the axles, but the SLR isn’t exactly what pops into your head when somebody says the words “mid-engine,” is it?) Murray’s sequel to the McLaren F1 was actually intended as another BMW collaboration, right up until Merc and McLaren joined forces in Formula 1. The two parties then conflicted in development, and the result’s never been properly appreciated on the same level as its contemporaries from Porsche and Ferrari. It’s a weird car with a weird origin story, as those TVR mules remind us.
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