Ariel Atom 1 (1999 - 2003) review, history and specs of the bare-bones sports car

There’s a vivid sense of déjà vu as the Atom rolls out of the covered transporter into the Welsh sunshine. I can’t remember the last time I saw an original Atom but I certainly remember the first time, and what makes this meeting so uncanny is that with its yellow body panels this car looks just like the prototype I drove for evo back in 1999.

I say ‘body panels’ but obviously a key feature of the Atom is that it doesn’t really have a body; a single-seat race car has more bodywork. What panels there are act as fig leaves, covering up mechanical gubbins so that the rest of the car can be remarkably clean and clutter-free, allowing the bold purity of the structure and design to wow you. And the original still does, even though the Somerset-based Ariel company is now on to Atom 4 and with each iteration the form has become more refined.

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My first drive of the prototype was on a chilly November day almost 26 years ago at an open test day at Donington Park circuit. Mixing it with Formula Fords and Caterhams, the Atom looked extraordinary. Still does. It was the car’s first shakedown and while it had only a 125bhp Rover K‑series in the back and wore modest wheels and tyres, it was quick. PTP, suppliers of the Rover engine, were there for the test and had brought along a couple of Caterhams on their own account. I got to try them too, and they confirmed that Ariel still had a way to go to find the best dynamic balance, but the potential of the Atom was writ large.

Now as then, an Atom draws a crowd wherever it goes because, uniquely, you can see pretty much everything that goes into it: the tubular chassis, horizontal inboard dampers up front, fluid reservoirs for the brakes and clutch, the plumbing for the front radiator… It’s even wilder from the driver’s seat: turn the steering wheel and you can see the column rotate, watch the rack’s rubber gaiters expand and contract and see the wheel and tyre assemblies swivel. It only gets more extraordinary as you drive along, seeing the brake discs spinning and the wheels and tyres rising and falling over bumps. It’s like driving in a technical animation or a cutaway car from a motor show stand.

The public got its first sight of what would become the Atom at the British International Motor Show at the NEC in 1996. Back then it was called the LSC – Lightweight Sports Car – and it was the end product of a student project at Coventry University, created under the tutelage of Simon Saunders. Blagging a spot at the show was a huge coup, but having the LSC exposed to raw feedback was perfect for the project, which, from the start, Saunders had insisted was designed to be built and be road-legal.

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‘I was taken on at Coventry University because I was from the car industry,’ says Saunders, who came with a background in car design at Vauxhall and Aston Martin. The germ of the idea for the Atom came from a book about automobile engineering that he’d read as a kid. ‘In it there was a photograph of an unbodied car – wheels, chassis, engine exposed – and it looked absolutely amazing. And then you turned the page and there was the finished car with the body on it and it was so disappointing.’ Another inspiration was the Caterham Seven. ‘It’s a very simple car, doesn’t really have doors. I was keen to do something which used that proven recipe but do it in a modern way.

‘The students loved it to begin with. The starting point was, how many wheels has it got? Where’s the engine? I think we had 75 different iterations of wheels and seating positions, but one of the driving forces was that it could be made, it could go into production. I think the reality – and this is something I was trying to introduce them to – the reality of grafting on something day in, day out for a long period of time was a little too much for some of them. So it ended up with me and one student, Niki Smart, working on the LSC. A lot of it we did ourselves, out of the university, just to get it done.

‘When we showed it at the NEC, everybody loved the car but hated the tyres: it had tiny, narrow tyres, 135s, I think. We were trying to prove that you could have fun, go fast, with fairly humble credentials.’ However, it wasn’t just the tyres that were on the small side. ‘We’d made the LSC as small as we could and, in the end, when we drove it, we found it was too small,’ says Saunders. There was clearly huge potential, but to realise it the LSC would have to be scaled up. ‘Essentially, I started again. I left Coventry in ’97 having decided that my time was better spent bringing the Atom to life.

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‘It was three years from the show to having the first Atom ready to go. It was mostly just myself, but we had a modeller, and Niki Smart was still helping. He was at the Royal College by then. I came up with the Atom name on the train to London: it’s small and it whizzes around. We launched at the back end of 1999, made the first cars in 2000, and waited to see what would happen. The fact that the phone was ringing was obviously a good thing. I won’t say we were lucky, but we were in the right place at the right time because the trackday thing was just beginning to start in a big way. We built 20 or 30 the first year. It was designed as a very simple car; we didn’t want something that was going to take weeks or months to make.’

It’s a measure of the Atom’s success that when Ariel recently went looking for an original car to add to its collection, it found itself paying more than the car cost when it first went on sale. Mind, back in 2000, a list price of £16,995 looked conspicuously good value versus the equivalent Caterham and Lotus Elise.

This car had been used by a company offering Atom experiences at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground and had been stored since 2011 so needed some light recommissioning. The compact SPA digital dash shows 15,909 miles, probably since new but probably hard miles, though there are no signs of wear, only some ageing: a bit of flakiness under the clear coat of the chassis, a chapped look to all the aluminium bits of the K-series, plus some surface rust on the steel pulleys.

Of course, it’s had a set of brand new tyres. The first Atom came with regular rubber, the first Continental Premium Contact, in fact, while here the Tecnomagnesio wheels are shod with 195/50 HR15 Yokohama Neovas, the sort of dry-biased, trackday-style tyre that wasn’t available 25 years ago.

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What’s as admirable today as it was then is the quality of the design, not just in overall terms but in detail. There’s no unsightly wiring, no clumsy bracketry, no unattractive stuff front of house, if you like. (Well, apart from the handbrake, a pressed steel, black-painted item that looks like it came from an Austin Cambridge.) Also, the tubular chassis has the steering column mountings on both sides, while the steering column connects to the centre of the rack and the lovely Tilton pedal box is a self-contained unit, so left- and right-hand-drive versions don’t require a huge amount of separate inventory.

Reminders that I was a fair bit younger when I last drove a first-gen Atom come at me fast. Climbing in, I manage to swing over the side beam with a degree of nonchalance but, gee, the seat isn’t too welcoming. It never was, though. Driver and passenger are served by one great big moulding, which obviously saves weight and complexity. It is adjustable for reach (with Allen keys) but even in the right place it’s not comfortable for me because there’s no padding at all. I can feel individual vertebrae contacting the seat, so it’s a bit like getting into a bath without the cushioning effect of the water.

I press the start button to rouse the 125bhp K-series and – wow! – the vibrations! I’d completely forgotten that with the engine bolted directly to the chassis, you feel the engine work through the rev-range as much as hear it. The buzz that comes through the whole car, the seat, pedals and wheel, is so strong, and not just at high revs, that if you’ve got any sort of catarrh problem, a mile in this running up and down the gears will sort it out. We’re not quite ready to go, though. Buckle up the harness belt, pull down the straps and pop on a crash helmet too, because at anything above 30mph your eyes will be streaming.

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Right from the off, just a tickle of the throttle sends the Atom surging forward, a grin-inducing reminder of the benefits of ultra-light weight. It’s less than 500kg, same as the lightest Caterham Sevens, which is impressive because it feels bigger and wider. Then again, there’s less to it. Yet while the air-stream buffets your head, it doesn’t spill into the cockpit despite there being no side panels.

The ride is better than it seems at first: you just notice the bumps more because of the hard seat. So make a conscious effort to relax: unclench your teeth, loosen your grip on the chunky little Momo and tap into the flow. Dynamically, initially it feels much the same as it did back in the day, with the sense of a lot more weight at the back than the front; a contemporary Seven had a better static balance and worked its front and rear more evenly. The early Atom felt more like the Gordon Murray-designed Light Car Company Rocket, which also had its major mass at the back, and it made getting the lightly loaded front to work a bit of a challenge.

Ariel gradually improved this as the years passed, but at the first proper corner it’s clear that this recommissioned Atom has much better balance than any of the early cars I drove. Those sporty Yokohamas deliver impressive grip but with lovely progression, so you can revel in the Atom’s lack of inertia and manage any slip with confidence. Its steering is well weighted and accurate and while the unassisted brake pedal is a little long, it offers good feel and modulation once you’re into it, so you’re not going to lock a wheel very easily, which is a good thing.

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There’s not much risk of oversteer with this particular K-series, which currently goes a bit flat at the top end, but the first Atom was never much of a tail-out sort of car anyhow. It’s much more satisfying to preserve momentum, to use its agility to carry speed for point-to-point pace. Even with the vibrations and the lack of backrest padding, it’s impossible not to enjoy yourself on a great bit of road, or to take joy from your remarkable surroundings when you’re just bimbling along.

‘I think we found a niche, and that’s what low-volume manufacturers need to do,’ says Saunders. All the elements were there from the start but, just as impressive has been the evolution of the Atom from these humble beginnings.

Ariel Atom 1 specs

This story was first featured in evo issue 335.