Buy This Incredibly Rare TVR T440R So We Don’t Have To

It seems that, once again, the TVR dream is dead. It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything from the attempted revival of the company, its 2024 financial accounts are long overdue, and in May this year, its director resigned.

We’ll likely never see the new Griffith hit the road, then, and it’s got us thinking about the dying days of the company’s original iteration. Even as the bonkers Cerbera Speed 12 fell by the wayside, it had racing ambitions. Some of these would be realised with the T400R, but the company had designs on the top GT1 class too with this, the T440R.

It may look like an elongated Tuscan, but it’s built around a completely bespoke tubeframe chassis, complete with a carbon tub, a flat aluminium undercarriage, and carbon bodywork. Power came from a 4.2-litre dry-sumped version of the company’s Speed Six straight-six engine, sent through a five-speed manual.

The 440 in its name? That’ll be the bhp it makes which, in a car that only weighed around 1100kg and featured the square root of jack in terms of driver assists, was probably a bit of a handful. It was reckoned that anyone brave enough could get the T440R to 60mph in under four seconds, and on to a top speed comfortably north of 200mph.

Overall, just four T440Rs were built in the early noughties. Three were prototypes, which later ended up either destroyed or reworked into Typhons, a slightly more refined version of which only a tiny handful were built.

This is even rarer, though: it’s the sole production-spec T440R. It was supplied new in 2003 to Lawrence Tomlinson, the businessman who’d later go on to buy and turn around Ginetta Cars. He was one of just two owners the car’s had, covering 26,665 miles between them, during which it’s been treated to a full mechanical and cosmetic refresh.

It’s now going under the hammer at Iconic Auctioneers’ Silverstone Festival sale on 23 August, where it’s expected to fetch between £160,000 and £190,000. That seems reasonable for a one-of-one GT racing homologation special, even if the planned race car never arrived. Frankly, though, you’d have to pay us that much to summon up the courage to try and unleash all 440bhp.