Hell hath no fury like the Hellcat

The Bugatti Veyron's crown for being the most potent road car on the market is about to be rudely snatched by a British upstart.

The car in question is the Melling Hellcat -- Melling who? Yes, our thoughts exactly. The company is the brainchild of engine guru Al Melling, who is based in Lancashire in the UK.

His outrageous creation packs a quad-turbo (yes, you read right) 6.0-litre V10 milled entirely from aluminium billets. The claimed outputs are a staggering 895kW (well in excess of the Veyron's 736kW) at 7200rpm and a planet-spinning 1192Nm at 5400rpm.

These prodigious outputs are channelled to the rear wheels via a six-speed transaxle gearbox. Interestingly, although the Hellcat is front-engined, it has a slight rearward weight bias.

The chassis is a steel spaceframe with all-independent suspension, while the body panels are rich in carbonfibre and aluminium, which means kerb weight is a surprisingly sprightly 1200kg -- not too much more than the Mazda MX-5, and well below the 1888kg Veyron.

Braking power should be up to the mark as the Hellcat uses the same six-pot AP racing calipers as the Veyron.

Melling claims his tearaway dispatches the 0-100km/h split in around 2.6sec, and he believes the car's gearing, aerodynamics and weight would allow a theoretical v-max of 400km/h, but the official claim for now is a figure of 360km/h.

Unlike the luxury-lined Veyron, the British bulldog is a minimalist car with no climate control and no stereo -- there isn't even a bootlid!

Melling says production (20 cars annually) will begin towards the end of this year, and he hopes to sell them in a UK at around $506K a pop, which sounds on the expensive side, but it's still a relative bargain compared with the Double Bay/Toorak mansion-priced Veyron.

Try not to get pulverised in the sales stampede.