The Transformers

There are some cars that should never see the tarmac of a public highway, but someone forgot to tell a handful of Aston Martin Vulcan owners that. Step inside the workshop of RML, the firm that is making the track day monster street-legal.

- Richard Meaden

It’s a fact of life that if you tell someone they can’t have something, that something is immediately what they want more than anything in the whole world. If you happen to be one of the 24 lucky souls who managed to secure one ofAstonMartin’s £1.8million and very definitely track-only Vulcans, that ‘something’ is the possibility to drive it on the road.

You’d think threading the 820bhp, slick-shod, down force-drenched monster into Eau Rouge, or howling round the floodlit fantasy world of AbuDhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit would be more than enough fun, but we should never underestimate the importance of being able to drive to the pub and impress your mates.

And so, by popular demand, and despite never being designed with road use in mind, the Vulcan is being made road legal by RML Group, based in Welling borough, North amptonshire. If you’re into your racing you’ll know RML is steeped in motor sport history, but there’s another side to the company: a lesser-known but no less impressive skill set for making apparently impossible one-off cars for a select band of brilliantly nuts customers. Perhaps the best known of these is the Juke-R–Nissan’s noble project to turn its plug-ugly crossover into a thug-tastic 200mph beast that concealed the drive train of a GT-R.

Two were built for Nissan as promotional vehicles, and that was supposed to be the end of it. At least until three people with £300,000 to blow wouldn’t take no for an answer, at which point Nissan bent some rules and allowed RML to build them.TheVulcanproject is a little different in that its starting point is one of the world’s most expensive and exciting hyper cars, but the goal is one and the same, namely making the impossible possible.