Terrify Yourself With This 400bhp Supercharged Brooke Double R

The British lightweight sports car industry is a fascinating and often unforgiving place. For every Caterham, Radical and Ariel that carves out a handy marketplace niche for itself, there’s a handful of companies that give it a ruddy good go, launching some insectoid, supercar-bothering machine only to quietly disappear a few years later.

Devon-based Brooke Cars was one of the latter categories. Emerging at some point in the 2000s, it bought the rights to the Brooke name and a basic car design from an even more obscure company that had tried something similar in the ’90s.

Its sole offering, the Double R, was cut from the same cloth as Gordon Murray’s Light Car Company Rocket, with looks inspired by the cigar-shaped F1 racers of the ’60s. The big difference was that while the Rocket was a strict single-seater, you could bring a passenger along in the Double R.

It’s hard to pin down exactly how many Double Rs were built before the company disappeared at the tail end of the noughties, but most of them came with a naturally aspirated, Cosworth-fettled 2.3-litre Ford Duratec engine making around 260bhp, sent through a five-speed manual ’box.

That, frankly, is plenty in a car that weighed around 550kg, but this isn’t one of those cars. It’s the sole Double R 400, which saw a supercharger strapped to the engine to produce – yes – 400bhp. Not only that, but while most Double Rs had fibreglass bodywork, this one was made from aluminium, mirror-polished and left unpainted like some 1950s airliner.

The result of that Lotus Emira-matching power output and claimed 510kg kerb weight is 784bhp per tonne. Slightly more than a Ferrari F80, in other words. And this is in a car with no doors or windscreen, let alone anything as nannying as driver assists.

The driving experience, we have to imagine, is lively. As, we suspect, is the passenger experience, depending on how much faith whoever’s wedged into the second seat has in the person at the controls. Supposedly, it’ll hit 60mph in under three seconds.

This particular car appears to have bounced around various auction sites for the past few years, although it’s apparently only on its third owner, so may not have sold at all of them. With a mere 1795 miles on the clock, it’s now looking for a new keeper again in an online sale with Iconic Auctioneers.

They reckon it could fetch between £42,000 and £46,000, and as we write this, with a little over three days left on the sale, bidding is up to £7000. It certainly has rarity on its side, so maybe it’s nothing but sheer terror that have stopped it finding buyers in the past. It certainly looks like one of the most exclusive ways of ruining your underwear on a track day.