TVR’s never had it easy. The British carmaker, celebrated for its wild sports cars, is still working to bounce back from its collapse in the mid-2000s while under the leadership of Russian banker Nikolay Smolensky. That episode left a number of projects on the cutting room floor, one of which being this 2003 TVR T440R. It was put up for sale this week by Autolounge via Pistonheads, and it’s the only one of its kind ever made.
Strap yourself in, because this is way more confusing than it ever should’ve been. To keep things relatively short, the T440R was originally called the TuscanR and was intended as a roadgoing, homologation version of what was to be TVR’s Tuscan-based GT1-class challenger. Then branding changed for whatever reason, and TVR ultimately sold two examples of this car — one called the T400R, with a 4-liter straight-six, and another called the T440R, with a 4.2-liter version of the same engine. The latter is the car up for sale now.
That duo morphed into the Typhon — a supercharged version with even more power. TVR built and sold just three of those according to Dyler, right around the same time the company itself was purchased by Smolensky. The change in ownership plunged the model’s future into a limbo it never saw its way out of, and no more Typhons ever left TVR’s factory.
That leaves this T440R as the only car of its spec ever made; a race car molded for road use that, in typical TVR fashion, never had its sharpest edges sanded down. That’s made abundantly clear reading some of the finer details of the car’s construction.
TVR repurposed many engine components from the T440R race car for its road counterpart, though output was reduced to 440 horsepower as I’m sure you already guessed. The floor’s flat, just like a GT car’s. The chassis was made from a mixture of carbon fiber and aluminum, with a separate carbon fiber tub within that and yet more carbon fiber comprising the bodywork. Much of that carbon fiber can be seen from within the cabin where you’ll also find two small backseats, believe it or not. Yes, for all its ripsnorting TVR pedigree, this homologation special is technically a 2+2.
The T440R — the operative word being “the” — has 25,000 miles on it, which is more than one might expect for a pseudo-production car that never got a proper run. It’s priced at £192,990, or about $265,000. With the new Griffith still not quite real yet, this is an unexpectedly great opportunity to own one of the last TVRs ever made. Or never made, depending on how you look at it.