In the late 1990s, there was a war going on in the roads. The McLaren F1 was dominating sports car makers everywhere with its futuristic design, and in 1998 set the still-unbroken record for fastest production car worldwide, 240 mph. British maker TVR, however, was not about to take this challenge lying down, and in 1996 displayed the first model of the TVR Project 7/12. The 7 referred to the number of liters in the engine, although it was actually 7.7, and the 12 stood for the number of cylinders. The engine could produce over 1000 horsepower and was so expensive to build that only five are known.In 1998, TVR was prepared to show their beauty off to the world as the newly renamed Speed 12. The company planned to bring the car to the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, but things didn’t pan out. The car did win several races at the British GT championshipwith their engines limited to 700 horsepower! Even at this speed, the car was almost impossible to control, leading many to fear how an unrestricted vehicle would drive.Unwilling to let their baby die, though, TVR segued the project into a consumer version called the Cerbera Speed 12. Only one vehicle was created to be displayed at the 2000 British Motor Show. Despite being intended for the road, the engine was unrestricted and the tires were Goodyear Fioranos. Peter Wheeler, owner of TVR at the time as well as a racer in the Tuscan Challenge, drove the monstrous vehicle home from the show and came to an unfortunate but unsurprising conclusionthe car was too powerful to ever be used on the road.The car was sold in 2003, with its engine restricted to 880 horsepower, and now has a strong afterlife in the pages of auto magazines and video games, appearing in the title Gran Turismo 4.