The new Radical SR3 SL road-legal track day car is a big deal for the Peterborough-based race and sports car company - it will be the only fully type-approved track day special on the market. So? Well, the 'so' is the fact that type-approval, especially with the painstaking rigorous standards of the latest Euro 5 regulations, is an exceptionally complex and expensive process.
To enter into such an endeavour is a measure of Radical's self-belief in its ability to get a 'grown-up' car company's job done; it's also a gamble that there exists a market large enough to recoup the development costs exists. In terms of reassurance that the idea wasn't complete lunacy, it must have come as some relief when Ford approached Radical with the offer of supplying its brand new and technically advanced 2.0-litre EcoBoost four-cylinder engine, complete with turbocharger, heaps of power and torque, and very low emissions.
Radical currently produces about 200 cars per year and expects the SL - which stands for Street Legal - to raise that figure to about 250 cars. That's quite a hike and pushes the company's existing factory facility close to full capacity; we were treated to a quick tour of the place, and it does seem very busy and bereft of spare space.
Our tour was Radical's way of showing off that it's now a 'proper' car maker, rather than a bunch of blokes in a shed in the east. The company is split into three divisions: Radical Sports Cars; Radical Precision Engineering, which fabricates chassis and components both for the mother ship and external clients such as Mosler and the MoD; and Radical Performance Engines, which supplies engines directly to Radical Sports Cars, and also tends to the needs of customers' cars.
Although Radical foresees road car sales accounting for a sizeable chunk of its business for the next 18 months to two years, racing remains at the heart of the company. Radical runs its own UK Cup and a European championship, but there are numerous other Radical one-make series throughout Europe, the Middle East, the USA, Australia and Mexico. While strolling through the final assembly hall we saw one car labelled for shipment to the US, while another couple were headed to India as part of a batch of 30 cars destined for an independent Indian series. Radical's boast of being a 'global' company seems to have substance.
The development of the SR3 SL was hustled along by Radical's MD, Phil Abbott, who explains that, "we were getting a lot of requests for a road-legal, type-approved car from our central- and eastern-European customers.
"So the SL has been born out of that demand and we see it as the future for the business; currently we seem to be the first company out there with a car type-approved to Euro 5 standards."