Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Vandal Cars. Most people haven't. And with good reason. “You probably aren’t familiar because we just covertly launched the brand,” Jeremy Sutton, chairman of Vandal Cars, says. The company's been operating with the secrecy of a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works program for the last couple years, chasing down a dream of building what Sutton describes as “stunning, purposeful performance cars” for "a track enthusiast lifestyle." In other words: cars for people who like to drive really, really fast. “We just wanted to give every enthusiast a chance to drive a car with world beating performance at a price that won’t break the bank,” Sutton says. "This is probably the closest thing someone will experience to being in an F1 car.”

Vandal Cars A rendering of the Vandal One.

Just because the team is new doesn't mean the players are rookies. Vandal's employees are alumni of such notable companies as McLaren, Lola, and Ford Racing, according to Sutton; Jeremy himself spent time at Ford's famed SVT division, as well as across the Pond working on the likes of the TVR Speed 12 and Cerebra. ("I was probably one of the only Americans working at TVR," Sutton says.) As such, the company—an enterprise that the chairman says has largely been boot-strapped by a handful of private investors—has the advantage of being able to lean on industry connections to help source the parts: Honda Performance Development, Sadev, Pirelli, and other well-known OEM suppliers all contributed to the project. For their first project, the Vandal Cars team set out to build a vehicle designed for track-day fun, one that could battle against the Ariels, Radicals, and BACs of the world—in Sutton's words, a car "to scratch the itch that we’ve always had" as enthusiasts.

Vandal Cars The Vandal One chassis mule, seen without its carbon fiber body panels.

No monster can thrive without a mighty heart, of course. In the case of the Vandal One, that thumping powerplant comes straight from a car that needs no introduction to gearheads around the globe: the Honda Civic Type R. "That engine was the perfect fit for our first product," Sutton says. Dialed up to around 340 horsepower thanks to revised tuning, the turbocharged inline-four known as the K20C1—which also sees duty in the Ariel Atom 4, a car with a similar mission brief to the Vandal One—might not seem like a lot of power in this Hellcat-all-the-things era. Stop to consider that the car weighs in around 1,220 pounds wet, however—a mere 39 percent of the Type R's curb weight—and those 340 ponies start to seem a little more intimidating. In fact, that combination of horses and poundage means the Vandal One has a power-to-weight ratio of 3.59 pounds per hp. A Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, by comparison, sits at 4.37 pounds per pony—and that's based on its dry weight. “Because the car is track-focused, having the car be as lightweight as possible was one of the main criteria,” Sutton says.

Vandal Cars The Vandal One chassis mule

As if that weren't mad enough...that's just the base version. Opt for what Sutton describes as the "R Engine Package," and the Civic Type R engine is rebuilt from soup to nuts with forged internals, a BorgWarner EFR 7163 turbo, port and direct injectors, and other enhancements, delivering both more boost and the ability to rev to 9,100 rpm. Maximum output? Figure 550 to 560 horsepower. "Its 60-130 [mile-per-hour] time is gonna be world-beating," says Sutton. Normally, the mightier engine will be limited to around 480 horses, Sutton says, with the rest of the power available using a push-to-pass system that monitors the chassis via yaw sensors and the external environment via GPS and determines if the car is in a good place to handle the full wallop before freeing the extra power.

Vandal Cars The Vandal One chassis mule