I'll admit, my car choice this week was picked solely out of laziness: I've been wanting to test the braking difference between GTS and GT7 for a while now, but aside from COTW, I never ever touch my 2 month old PS5. I got the test done and made a thread about it, but the price to pay for that has been utter chaos and anarchy in our weekly races suffered by everyone, and I sincerely apologise for not picking the RCZ Gr.3 Road Car instead. Maybe if I had picked the Pug, McClarenDesign would've found a ball or two in his purse and joined us after he used up all the balls he had to hold my family at gunpoint demanding to know early what this week's pick is.
Long hood, short deck, big NA engine up front sending power exclusively to the rear via a manual stick and offering drivers absolutely zero aids, I'm tempted to describe the Tuscan as a British Viper. In fact, before I get to my usual thing and tell you about how the car drives, I feel it's imperative to really take a moment to look closely at the two cars and just appreciate how awfully similar they are.
In addition to the classic long hood, short deck FR body style, both cars are primarily built as open top cars, and I find the door shapes and side windows so eerily similar between the two, with a highly raked curve stabbing into the engine compartment up front, a cleaner, flatter curve at the back, and a curvaceous windshield to give excellent visibility from the cockpits.
Where the Tuscan differs from the Viper is that the Tuscan is so insane in its design, it almost makes the Viper's lunacy feel more like a by product of its performance, like Dodge wasn't even trying to make the Viper the poster child for insanity, and TVR were coveting that title I just made up on the spot. The rev counter is digital and dead centre in the dash, with an analogue speedo forming a dome above it, when you would think that it would be the other way around. The brake lights are too low, the turn signals are roof mounted for reasons known perhaps only to Peter Wheeler and his psychotherapists, and the door release button is mounted under the side mirrors for some reason. About the only area in insanity that TVR hasn't tried to upstage the Viper is not having side exit exhausts running through the door sills to cook the occupants of the car alive, because the extra heat might actually be appreciated in chilly Britain.
So then, it's less a British Viper and more like a bastard love child of one, trying its best to upstage and overshadow its father in every area and respect. Who might the mother be in this metaphorical scenario, you might ask? Well, given that the damn thing weighs in at an unbelievably scant 1,100kg (2,425lbs) thanks to a lightweight fibreglass body and the complete absence of any safety equipment, I'd have to say, maybe an Englishwoman by the name of Elise?
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The car's brochure leads me to believe that Tuscans with the 3996cc Speed Six engine ought to have come equipped with larger 18 inch wheels and 255mm tyres, but the Tuscan in the game, while having the 4L engine, comes with the standard 16 inch aluminium alloys and slimmer 225mm tyres. Whichever wheel and tyre set you end up with, it seems that the Tuscan doesn't stagger its tyre sizes at all in any event, which serves as yet another slap across the face of common sense and another nudge towards you careening off into the safe, gentle caress of the trackside barrier with every corner you attempt with the car.
Take advantage of all the grip the front end has to offer turning into a corner like a sane tool, and the rear end will be more than happy to swing out, with its sloppy suspension taking all weight off the rear of this perfectly balanced car. Even though the game claims that the Tuscan has rather adequate sounding 1.8Hz springs, the car itself feels like it has a ND Roadster–esque 1.3Hz in practice—the car will exhibit horrendous pitch and roll in any situation other than cruising and standing still. The sloppy suspension makes everything you attempt with the car a precarious exercise, from corner entry, exits, transitions, and everything in between, forcing drivers to be cognizant of where weight is at all times on the car and deliberately conscious of how they treat it every time they approach a corner. In my AE86 review, I said that the 86 deeply romanticises the process of weight transfer; the Tuscan necessitates it by holding the lives of you and those around you prisoner, with the ransom of being treated in a very exacting way that it likes.
Perhaps because of the soft suspension taking all weight off the rear tyres, the car stops as though it were a 1.5 tonne car rather than the 1.1 that it is, with freakishly long braking distances that constantly caught out myself and my peers during race day, ABS on or off. Once you've shaved off enough speed to turn into a corner, you have to carefully nurse the car in, lest you lean the car with slinkies for suspension too much and it overloads the outside tyres into making all grip disappear into a puff of smoke, wherein you will find your perspective of the racetrack magically turned 180° around once the smoke clears. On corner exits, the soggy springs mean that you'll have to watch for both power oversteer and understeer, with the NA Inline 6 having gobs or torque to break grip on the default Sport Hard tyres from low rpm. If the power is put down cleanly through a therapeutic massage of the right pedal, the explosive power simply lifts the front end of the car horrendously, sending the car torpedoing into the outside barrier with understeer and leaving a curvaceous indentation in the wall far higher than the car's ride height of 102mm (4.02in). And if you thought it was scary in low and mid speed corners, wait till you attempt to tackle high speed corners like Suzuka's 130R with a car that has the aerodynamic properties and stiffness of a velvet bra.
Oh, and watch out for kerbs and rumble strips too—they're an instant death sentence without ABS and absent any tactile feedback from the car lost in the digital divide. Avoiding them on certain tracks, such as the braking zone into Laguna Seca's Corkscrew for example, not only requires very hard reprogramming of one's head to actively avoid the shortest, straightest path if it includes rumble strips, but the extra weaving in avoidance just upsets the softly sprung car and causes it to roll, elongating the braking distances which means you have to brake earlier and ARGH, you get the point. It is not fun. Driving the car is as much physical exercise as it is mental. If your grannies ever complain that they got sick of Wii Sports, hook up Gran Turismo Sport and a wheel, and have the try the Tuscan.
So intense is the driving experience of the Tuscan that, during race day, I felt constantly stressed from behind the wheel, and always grateful to have survived any corner without contact. I was soaked in sweat for that whole two hours, and not even just the "my skin's kinda sticky because there's a thin layer of sweat on it" kind of sweat, but the "entire beads of sweat are rolling down my body as though I'm outside running" kind of sweat. The only time I recall being this thoroughly terrified of a car was back in Week 165 when we tested the CHC Nova, and that needed more than more than twice the power of the Speed 6 to scare me like that!
Ahh, but I did say that the Tuscan was akin to being the kid of a Viper instead of a clone. Surely it has some traits from its other parent as well in my atrocious anthropomorphic analogy, the Lotus Elise, beyond simply being lightweight (and having no protection), right?
For starters, the 4L Speed Six engine is a delight thorough and through. So ample is the power from the Inline 6 that I never even noticed how the 2000MY sports car is saddled with a five speed gearbox still until I took my spec sheet screenshots! Despite what common sense might dictate, its power saves me from messes more than it gets me into them, as it helps me salvage a corner entry slide by letting me translate it into a drift, making it look intentional (and it totally was... most of the time... maybe). It has copious amounts of torque from any rpm range above "stall" to break grip on even the uprated Sport Medium tyres we were running on race day, letting drivers hold onto a long gear for an uninterrupted slide. For a car that I've complained to be precarious and imprecise like a slinky, it oddly feels more consistent when going sideways than straight, almost like it wants to. The soft suspension setup does at least let drivers put weight on any corner of the car as they intuit it, and the perfect mass distribution of 50:50 only enables and encourages said smoky shenanigans all the more once all hell has broken loose. It really does feel set up from the factory to drift!
And speaking of balance, I get the feeling that the car has been immaculately and purposefully set up from the factory to be a driver's car; the brake balance has been set from the factory to have just enough to lock up the front under full braking on a level road, and just enough to get the rear tyres to be at their absolute limits, skittish without actually skidding. Under full braking then, you get a car that is just right on that precipice of a knife edge, ready to stop, ready to turn, ready to spin, ready to lock up, ready for all hell to break loose at your command. The Tuscan offers a nigh inimitable driving experience with how raw it is, how it holds nothing back from you, and because of that, how much you can learn about driving from it if you survive the experience.
Nigh inimitable? What else can offer a similar experience to a Speed Six then? Why, funny you should ask!
A Viper, of course! Alongside a TVR Griffith, a second generation Dodge Viper is the other "final boss" of Gran Turismo 1, with the game's eight final licence tests alternating between the two. Okay fine, my Viper isn't red and my TVR isn't a Griffith, but you know what they say about lemons and life. Or blueberries, because my cars are blu- okay this metaphor is going nowhere.
Fittingly, the Viper is also similarly terrifying to drive, sharing so many similarities to the Tuscan as I noted earlier. The snake may weigh in at a hefty chunk more than the British featherweight, at 1,569kg (3,459lbs), but it also has four more cylinders to give 88 more horsepower over the TVR at 448HP (334kW). And so this on track comparison quite simply boils down to a classic David vs. Goliath scenario, of power versus lightness, which the British seem oddly enamoured by for some reason. But what I'm about to say might make them spill their tea in horror and call me a sodding twat or whatever culturally rich and charming insult they'll invent next.
I think the Viper drives better than the Tuscan.
The Viper is feels stiffer sprung despite it not being so in terms of natural frequency. It certainly corners flatter and squirms about less in the bends. It has much stronger brakes, readily locking up its chunkier tyres that are perpetually pressed into the road more by the Viper's increased mass. Despite the biased, tyrannical British governing body of our lobbies crippling my Viper down to 99% power, the 2002 Viper readily kept close with the lighter Tuscan around Tsukuba, one of the tightest and most technical courses in the game. How close? Well, rather than tell you, why don't I show you instead?
The bigger tyres. The stronger brakes. The flatter cornering. The 83 extra horsepower. All of that just to even out its massive 460kg (1,014lbs) handicap to the Tuscan, and the end result is that the Viper runs very closely to the Tuscan on Tsukuba. Anywhere else, I think the Viper will have a clear, pronounced edge in hot lap times over the Tuscan. As an American car, it has its characteristic cost advantage over the Tuscan as well, with the Michigan Menace being some 4.5k cheaper than the Blackpool Bruiser in GTS. Not to mention, the Viper is just easier to drive as a whole in my opinion. Never thought you'd read that previous sentence in your life? I didn't think I was going to write that ever in my life, either.
That all being said, all is not lost for the Tuscan. There's a certain sensation, a certain pocket in its handling envelope I think that gives something intangible the Viper cannot. It's a lairy car that lets you know it wants to play all the time. It will break grip on any of its tyres and give you all the tools to slide it around with controlled precision after it obtains your consent... by taking it from you. Its better balanced body makes weight transfer much more intuitive, its narrower tyres let go more linearly, and it simply feels like it's a car that has had much more thought put into not only playing with the driver, but surprisingly, also in allowing the driver to play with it. The Tuscan's playfulness puts some emphasis on enjoying the drive, imploring drivers to go slow enough to smell the roses and tyre smoke while being fairly and intensely engaging at any speed. That is just something I have never felt an inkling of in a Viper, which won't hesitate to break bones if you break its grip, and hopefully not your own ;) . That the Tuscan can run sidewall to sidewall with a much more focused feeling Viper then, is in itself, a testament and compliment to how capable the it is, even without the upsized wheels and tyres. It just isn't my cup of tea, so to speak.
But then of course, such performance and perilous playfulness is something one should expect from a TVR.
A baby TVR.
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