Vivacious Vans – Five Bonkers Boxes

We often get vans of varying types come up for sale via our auctions platform. Currently we have this characterful Type 2 VW Bay Window Camper available, as well as this rather delightful Morris Minor van, both of which got us to thinking, as browsing the myriad listings invariably does.

A stalwart of our roads for decades the humble van is built for a single purpose and that purpose is to lug stuff around. Simple. Whether that be tools, materials or people, it doesn’t matter – what matters is their capacity and practical ability to move large quantities of things. The Americans have the pickup truck, us Brits have our vans. A perennial sight and the “backbone of Britain”, as the familiar Ford Transit is known, but they are not particularly renowned for going fast, despite what some of their more imprudent drivers might have you believe – we’ve all been brashly overtaken by tradesmen in panel vans trying to beat the rush to get home on a Friday afternoon, let’s be honest.

But besides the odd ring-road racer, vans are, generally speaking, not performance oriented. There are a few models that can hustle to a degree, like the Mercedes Vito and VW Transporter, both hitting 60mph in around 9 seconds, and even though that’s not bad for what is essentially a box on wheels, they are still not what we would call fast. There are, however, a handful that brazenly eschew any typical van-like conventions in favour of being, quite frankly, bonkers.

Human endeavour never ceases to amaze; from launching people into space to exploring the bottom of the world’s oceans, if there’s an idea, and it’s possible, then people will have at it and that’s exactly the case when it comes to making vans go fast. We’ve compiled a list of five such creations for your reading pleasure so grab a coffee, put your feet up and revel in the esoteric, but incredible world of the supervan.

Renault Espace F1

Whomever had the idea of dropping the V10 engine from Alain Prost’s Formula 1 car into a Renault Espace MPV deserves to be commended. It was utterly ludicrous and we love it. Conceived in 1995 the Espace F1 produced the best part of 800bhp and could hit 62mph in 2.8 seconds, despite having the drag coefficient of a shed. Renault and the Williams F1 team joined forces to create this preposterous people carrier to celebrate ten years of the Espace, and what a birthday present it was. It featured a carbon fibre chassis with the engine sitting in the middle of the floor sending power to the rear wheels via a six-speed sequential gearbox. And it could still seat four people as it blasted its way to a top speed of 194mph. Madness.

Ford Supervan

While all of the vans on this list are indeed super to varying degrees, the Ford Supervan is the forefather of the genre and progenitor of the name. With three incarnations to speak of the project was a bid by Ford to raise the profile of its commercial vehicle wing. The original Supervan debuted in 1971 and was basically a transit body bolted to Ford GT40 running gear which meant 400bhp of V8 goodness. The second version, aptly named Supervan 2, followed in 1984 and was essentially a Ford C100 Group C race car fitted with a fibreglass Transit bodyshell. Oh, and it had nearly 600bhp thanks to its 3.9-litre Cosworth V8. The next manifestation to follow in the plume of its tyre smoke ten years later was (yep, you guessed it) Supervan 3. Based largely on its predecessor, but with a Mk3 body and a Cosworth HB V8 spitting out around 700bhp, it continued the theme dramatically. We’re still vainly holding out hope for number 4.

Volkswagen Revo Transporter

If there’s performance jiggery-pokery at work you can almost guarantee that the fabled Nürburgring will be involved and that was exactly the case with the VW Revo Transporter. Revo are a tuning company specialising in ECU software upgrades for a variety of cars, most notably VW and Audi Group vehicles and they decided they wanted to put their money and their mouth in the same space. By tweaking a used VW T5 van with their performance software they were able to up the power of the standard 2.0-litre, twin-turbo diesel to 220bhp and along with some other performance and suspension upgrades set out to beat the previous van lap record of the ‘Ring set by the late, great Sabine Schmidt. Spoiler alert – they smashed it with a time of 9 mins 57 seconds.

Guy Martin’s Ford Transit

With a ‘yeah why not, I’ll have a go’ attitude, motorcycle racer and general speed freak Guy Martin decided he wanted in on the van action and so in 2018, as part of a television special, he took his own personal Ford Transit and turned it into a race car, despite it having been previously crashed and restored. Again, using the Green Hell as a benchmark he broke the previous record that the VW Revo had turned in by a full 29 seconds. An impressive feat, but then this particular supervan did have a 3.5-litre, twin-turbo EcoBoost V6 engine in it that was tuned by Radical Performance Engines to produce over 700bhp.

Optima Mercedes R63 AMG

Last year American race car lunatic-cum-stunt driver Tanner Foust set a new speed record when he topped out at 165.5mph in a tuned Mercedes R63. (Yes, we know it’s technically a minivan but we’re including it anyway because it’s awesome, and besides, the Espace is technically a people carrier but that still counts too as far as we’re concerned, so there.) The original R63 AMG was a bit of an oddball that never really found a market and was canned by Mercedes after just one year of production, but this particular car wasn’t exactly standard. The factory 6.2-litre V8 was fitted with a Weistec supercharger and along with other various mods managed a peak power output of around 700bhp, which was enough to secure the fastest street-legal minivan record. We’re not really sure what the point was but then we don’t really care either, we’re just glad stuff like this happens.

So the next time you pull up to the traffic lights next to that rather uninspiring load-lugger it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to envisage a whopping great engine sitting in the back, ready to propel the thing to the horizon before you’ve even let your foot off the clutch. Human endeavour – long may it continue to produce such inherently useless but thoroughly entertaining fare.