There's a storied history of European sports-car makers looking to America for power. The Sunbeam Tiger featured a 260-inch Ford V-8. Iso's Grifo started off with Chevy small-block engines, then went wobbling-zonkers with big-block motivation. Monteverdi rather famously wedged a 426 Hemi behind the seats of its lovely Hai 450 SS for maximum vehicular karate. More recently, Bristol used the Viper's V-10 in the Fighter and a revived Marcos installed modern Corvette powerplants in their TSO until they once again fell into liquidation. So the Iceni, a new machine from another British upstart with an old name—in this case,Trident—isn't exactly a bowl-us-over concept. Except for one thing: The Yankee lump between the fenders is a 6.6-liter Duramax diesel.
We've seen pickup guys pull ginormous numbers out of these engines with minimal fiddling, but Trident doesn't seem to have messed with the power production all that much, claiming 395 hp and 700 lb-ft. GMC will give you 397 hp and 765 lb-ft in a Sierra 2500. In other words, the big compression-ignition eight is barely breathing in the Iceni, although it claims the car is good for more than 190 mph. Opt for the Track Package, and Trident claims you'll get a car with 660 hp and 1050 lb-ft., along with carbon-ceramic discs help haul the monster down. If that's just a bit excessive, there's the middle-of-the-road Performance Pack, offering 430 hp and 950 lb ft. To handle the power, Iceni's employed a six-speed slushbox with a torque converter that locks up from 1 mph.
The convertible Iceni model looks suspiciously like a T-top vehicle, but we assume Trident didn't want to make any more diesel/dust/Burt Reynolds associations than it had to. The hardtop Magna, however, looks flat-out mean, like a modern-day Cobra Daytona or Alfa TZ-1. Head into the gallery to gander at the side-exit exhaust. And scope the double-bubble roof, where the rear backlight bears some heart-shaped Brewster influence.
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But we think maybe the neatest thing about the Iceni is its ability to combust just about anything but gasoline. While it'll run fine on petroleum-distilled diesel fuel, Iceni also touts compatibility with 100-percent biodiesel and kerosene. We've always wanted a sports car that smelled like a jet, but we haven't been able to find a clean Howmet TX on Craigslist that's within our budget. Then again, while we don't have pricing information, we doubt the Iceni will come cheap, either.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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