A four-wheeled dose of magic potion: meet the all-analogue, open-topped Nichols N1A

Pray tell what is this, you ask. A Saturn V on a skateboard, that’s what. It’s called the Nichols N1A. It’s a handsomely raw British-built giant killer that looks like it’s been cooked up in a shed in the 1960s. Behind the cockpit sits a stentorian 7.0 naturally-aspirated pushrod Chevy V8. This produces 705bhp, while the whole car weighs just 900kg thanks to a bonded extruded aluminium and carbon-fibre chassis. 783bhp per tonne; that’s more than Ferrari’s latest hybrid hypercar, the F80. The N1A is a humble sports car that’s downed a gourd of Asterix’s magic potion. Its top speed of 240mph will leave the digital Fezza in the dust.

This is power-to-weight and performance we associate with old-school Formula One, which its inventor knows a lot about. He shouldn’t need an introduction, but he does. If you’re a petrolhead you’ll have heard of Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray, Rory Byrne and Adrian Newey – the Mount Rushmore of F1 designers. Steve Nichols should have a giant carving of his head somewhere at Silverstone, too. The 79-year-old American sketched the most dominant F1 car of all time, the McLaren MP4/4 which won 15 out of 16 races during the 1988 season (and would have won them all had Ayrton Senna not clouted a backmarker while leading at Monza).

Alongside colleague John Barnard, he was a pioneer of carbon-fibre monocoques. After this first chapter at McLaren, Nichols followed Alain Prost to Ferrari, before returning to McLaren as engineering director on the MP4/13 and MP4/14 that took Mika Hakkinen to double world title glory. Having retired from grand prix racing a quarter of a century ago, Steve’s turned his attention to the cars that first excited him as a young engineer and race fan: Can-Am.

The Canadian-American Challenge Cup was a radical sports car racing series held in North America from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. These open-cockpit, closed-wheel machines had a wide, flat silhouette, with a tiny windscreen and a long tail. The pushrod V8s were bestial. The fat tyres and vast exhausts added to the aesthetic of industrialised testosterone. They looked more like land-speed weapons or prototypes than finished racing cars. Just looking at them makes me want to grow a moustache and take up smoking.

The most lauded Can-Am cars were built by McLaren. The Nichols N1A takes direct inspiration from the McLaren M1A, the first sports car designed and developed by Bruce McLaren’s team in 1963. The M1A and its derivatives all had a similar power-to-weight as that of the featherlight and fire-breathing N1A. However, these Can-Am cars were built strictly for the track. The N1A is fully road-legal with a number plate and a thumbs up from the DVLA.

‘When I was looking for a project to keep me amused in my old age, the idea of taking a fresh look at the very first McLaren, the M1A, had great appeal,’ says Nichols. McLaren Automotive says it’s fully focused on the future not the past, which has allowed Nichols Cars to create a heritage product without stepping on any toes. Additional inspiration comes from what was arguably the most famous papaya-coloured McLaren before Lando Norris won the 2025 F1 title, the Chevrolet-powered M6A. Bruce McLaren drove this to victory in the 1967 Can-Am championship.

John Minett is Nichols Cars’ co-founder and CEO, and a veteran PR and commercial leader in the automotive and motorsport industries, including at Lamborghini and Super Aguri F1. ‘A lot of what ended up in Formula One [in the late 1960s and 1970s] started life in Can-Am,’ explains the 71-year-old Brit. ‘But as well as that, we wanted to get back to that era where things were designed to look beautiful. People didn’t really appreciate that it didn’t just go clean through the air, its flowing shape helped to push it down onto the track. I’d seen a car called the Ferrari P4/5, a one-off Pininfarina project based on an Enzo [commissioned in 2006 by the film director and financier James Glickenhaus]. It was a thoroughly modern car, but it was a nod to the 1967 Ferrari 330 P4. I thought it was a really successful update of 1960s styling themes. I’d always liked the McLaren M1A visually, and I thought that could lend itself to something similar. You can show it to someone who knows the era, someone of a certain age, and they’ll see a Can-Am car, but you can also show it to someone in their twenties and they’ll see a modern supercar. I’ve been asked on several occasions “is it a Pagani?” I couldn’t be happier with those two different reactions.’

‘Initially we intended it as a prototype,’ says Steve, ‘but time and registered interest has meant pursuing it with the aim to turn it into a beautifully finished vehicle worthy of my design philosophy.’ Nichols says a maximum of 150 cars will be built, though I expect the total number will be lower.

Starting at £500,000 (plus taxes) and being too impractical for the school and Sainsbury’s run, it’ll have an intrinsically exclusive clientele. I expect them to be older committed petrolheads, some hailing from Europe but mostly from the States. They’ll have at least another ten cars in the garage, including a McLaren no doubt. The N1A is what they’ll take out for visits to megabucks private members’ tracks such as Thermal in California, Concours Club in Miami and Ascari in Rhonda, Spain. The convenience of the N1A is you can drive it to the track, no trailer necessary.

So far three cars have been built: a dark blue prototype which has been destroyed, the light blue prototype seen here, which Wallpaper* has test driven, and a red car with white stripes that represents the first customer car. But there are more orders in the book. The tight-knit Nichols team of ten is almost exclusively comprised of ex-F1 people, mostly from McLaren. Among their number is Senna’s mechanic from his Lotus days, Mark Hannawin.

The studio is in Hampshire, but production itself is outsourced to Ray Mallock’s RML Group in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, which has built road and racing cars for Aston Martin, Nissan, Chevrolet, Bentley, McLaren Automotive and Saleen. And there’s been additional input from others in Nichols Cars’ extensive black book, like Dick Langford who worked on the Cosworth DFV when that ruled F1, turning his attention to the N1A’s LS7-based ‘smallblock’, Bob Mustard who was responsible for some of Lotus’s best chassis, and Ben Wood who was chief aerodynamicist for the Mercedes F1 team. This whole project is like The Expendables for pensionable engineers living in the UK’s motorsport valley. It’s an incredible talent pool.

The first 15 customer cars that Nichols is releasing will be labelled ‘Icon 88’ editions, complete with a plaque celebrating one of each of the MP4/4’s 1988 wins. Wallpaper*’s car, the prototype, gets the unofficial 16th plaque commemorating McLaren’s double DNF at that year’s Italian grand Prix. Unlucky for Alain and Ayrton, not so unlucky for me.

Size-wise, it’s similar to a Lotus Elise, but inside it’s even more spartan. Sitting in the N1A is an extreme feeling before you’ve even pressed the starter button. Your view of the road is incredibly low, just above the tips of your feet. The moulded Perspex windscreen is in the business of diverting air more than actually shielding you. The tiny seats are raked so far back that factor 50 is definitely necessary for the forehead. Having a passenger is a squeeze. This is a car you really want to drive alone so you can get your elbows out.

The aluminium open-gate six-speed transmission, adopted from the Audi R8 V10, is located door side, so on the right on this right-hand-drive car. It’s just like a Senna-era single-seater. The car’s wide pontoons and scalloped doors mean changing gear is actually very ergonomic, and the lozenge-like knob itself is inspired by something one of the Nichols lads found in a toolbox. ‘Oh look, it’s the gear knob Senna won the 1989 Monaco Grand Prix with. Might as well use it.’

One should ease oneself into a car like this, in terms of pedal action. Get a feel for the grunt and the carbon-ceramic brakes and the way it steers. In standard mode, power is restricted to 450bhp. Once you’re comfortable, press the button marked ‘11’. Presumably Steve and John are Spinal Tap fans. This unleashes all 705bhp and you’ll never want to go back to the standard mode again.

Although the experience of driving this car is as raw as freshly slaughtered bavette, it’s actually pretty easy to lean on. It’s planted and it doesn’t snap. It rewards the driver by boosting one’s confidence. No need to feel intimidated so long as you respect it. It’ll growl, but it won’t bite. Once you start to push the car, it becomes addictive. I drove it across the Pyrenees into Andorra. Then I got up very early and ragged it up a mountain at sunrise before the traffic came crawling out. It’s one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had on the road. Mash the throttle, get the revs above 4,000rpm and it comes alive like nothing with a licence plate should.

The soundtrack is Michigan-made drum and bass played by trumpets and throttle bodies. When the rhythm section kicks in, it sounds like God gargling Listerine. It makes a clacking roar; like dominoes the size of Stonehenge’s stones falling, hundreds of them, or the cacophony the Royal Marines band might make inside CERN’s large hadron collider: A brassy amplified apocalypse. There are no official acceleration figures, but 60mph arrives in about three seconds and it just goes on and on to the point I could no longer see because my glasses were vibrating too much on the bridge of my nose.

Most modern sports cars are like riding in a fast elevator. You whoosh up half a dozen floors a second without feeling like you’ve moved. The N1A is like abseiling back down again, and the building is on fire and filled with Iranian terrorists. It could be dangerous, but it’s very, very exciting. Double wishbone suspension on each corner with four-way adjustable Quantum dampers soaks up the undulating road. The car’s fluidity is a testament to its top-class engineering. The steering is heavy, but the whole experience is so composed that you could quite happily pound away at the N1A all day without ever tiring.

Never before has analogue motoring been more appealing, given that blue-chip manufacturers are hell bent on selling us cars designed to mollycoddle, restrict and anaesthetise. The N1A is all about emotion and freedom. It’s wild, in the same way wild salmon is far superior to farmed. It provides a serotonin rush that should probably require a prescription. To some, half a million quid is a better workaround. The engineering Expendables have created a wonder drug. If you could drive this car every weekend, you’d be a happier person.

Nichols-Cars.com, @NicholsCarLtd