Tuthill Meyers Manx LFG: the ultimate dune buggy

Never has being battered from every direction felt so entertaining. Dirt cakes my eyeballs, both eardrums must surely be ruptured, yet I’m cheering until my voice gives out.

Richard Tuthill has the bit firmly between his teeth - wearing that hard-eyed expression shared by infuriatingly gifted drivers once they find their rhythm - and he has the thing dancing. He hauls at the unassisted steering, right-left-right and then left once more (apparently excessive rear-brake bias rather than showboating), settling it into a long four-wheel drift. Then he stamps on the brakes, hammers down through the sequential gearbox and pulls off a flawless handbrake turn straight into the dust cloud he has just made. “We’ve got some testing to do with dust ingress,” Richard says, cleaning his glasses.

I couldn’t tell you exactly where we are - somewhere in Carmel Valley, I think. The Quail, a Motorsports Gathering - an upmarket car show, rather like Goodwood without the hillclimb but with sillier trousers and more money - took place around here yesterday. It was there that this UFO made its global debut. As with any worthwhile scheme, this one was thrown together hurriedly and developed as we went: 24 hours earlier, I had simply asked Richard whether his car actually drove, and what he was doing the following morning. From there, it escalated.

Photography: Mark Riccioni & Huck Mountain

We meet early to photograph the car, then ask every willing stranger whether they know of any nearby quiet tracks. It works: we are following a heavily moustachioed man in a pickup, trusting that he will lead us to a WRC-worthy dirt road rather than dismember us. He comes good. We have unrestricted use of a ridge-top strip, with cinematic scenery, baby-blue skies and, so far, all four limbs still present.

Tuthill Meyers Manx LFG: an extreme dune buggy

Strictly speaking, the vehicle isn’t much like a conventional car at all. It honours the original fibreglass dune buggy, the VW Beetle-based emblem of beachside freedom and good times. This is a rather extreme take on that idea, admittedly, but it is an official partnership between Tuthill - a firm with decades spent producing rally and racing cars, predominantly Porsches - and Meyers Manx. The latter was established in 1964 by Bruce Meyers and remains very much alive under its new owner, Phillip Sarofim.

“This project started as a dream between my long time pal Richard and me. We came together to imagine the perfect Meyers Manx, and after we laid the foundation, we invited our friend Freeman Thomas to bring his design brilliance to Tuthill’s engineering. The result is raw, visceral, novel. We call it LFG for a reason...”

We would call it the ultimate tool for messing about, but first, that name. Richard explains: “I was with my son and my daughter on the way to the airport, and we quite like acronyms – WTF, WRC, etc. I phone Phillip and tried WTF first, but after a bit of chat, we realised that was a bit aggressive, whereas LFG is actually quite a well known saying in the US. They say “Let’s Freaking Go!” – we might say it slightly differently – either way I reckon we all need to wake up in the morning with that attitude, let’s f****** go and do stuff.”

Park it in a lay-by and it looks completely mad. Every passing car stops for a conversation, and every occupant departs smiling. Its arrangement is straightforward: two seats at the front, the engine behind the occupants, gullwing doors that can be removed entirely - along with a substantial section of roof - plus a detachable rear hatch. We test it, and both of us can convert it to open-air form in a couple of minutes, exposing the rear deck. “One customer wants to stick his golf clubs back there, so we’ll make him a custom rack.” At every corner sit visible five-way-adjustable twin dampers with hydraulic bump stops - genuine rally hardware - alongside chunky BF Goodrich tyres.

The extravagant specification carries on with a full carbon-fibre body, four-wheel drive and front, centre and rear LSDs, a lightweight Inconel exhaust, four-piston off-road calipers and steel disc brakes. For a machine costing roughly £600,000 and restricted to 100 examples, you would demand as much. What stands out, though, is how its gentle curves and frog-eye lamps make it seem friendly and accessible, revealing little about the violence it can deliver.

Carbon body, 4WD and 300bhp

Making the car enjoyable and practical formed a central part of the brief, Richard says. “Look, we’re all aware of how much these lovely cars will cost, but you should go to the pub in it just as much as you should disappear into the mountains.” Importantly, this is not the final production car. It is a functioning prototype built to present the concept to the world, rather than necessarily to be driven flat-out on dirt. Before today, its entire test programme amounted to... one mile. Literally one mile. “The spec here is pretty close actually,” Richard says. “OK so there are plenty of prototype parts, but the chassis will not change.”

At the front bulkhead, it incorporates a 75kg piece of metal taken from a certain Stuttgart-built two-seat roadster. “That holds the aircon, steering column, wipers etc. And then we fit an FIA cross country roll cage clad in glorious carbon.” Kerb weight will be below 1,300kg, an impressive figure for a mid-engined four-wheel-drive machine with three differentials. Today’s car produces around 300bhp from its 3.5-litre flat-six, breathing through straight pipes because Richard wanted it to sound as outrageous as possible on the show stand. However, “several engine specifications will be offered including a four valve engine derived from the [11,000rpm] Tuthill 911K”.

13 minutes 17 seconds

Before Richard gives us the full private-rally-stage treatment, I am charged with driving us there on the road. The clutch is forgiving when pulling away, but the six-speed sequential gearbox thereafter needs precisely the right amount of force to slot home each ratio. Immediately, it feels light - almost floaty - while the engine lunges forwards at the slightest movement of your foot. As expected, ride quality is superb and wind noise is contained well. Aside from the absence of power steering, you could genuinely drive around and enjoy it every day. Whether merely teasing it or going flat out, this is a brilliant open-air analogue experience.

Naturally, I try it on dirt as well. Like every properly engineered performance machine, it becomes better, more precise, more eager and smoother as I push harder - right up until the edge of my own ability meets the knowledge that this is an untested one-off. Richard and I switch seats, the chaos described in the opening paragraph follows, and we are travelling alarmingly quickly. Its sound - like a million furious hornets - echoes across the valley. The suspension absorbs the track, while Richard places the car right on the limit, though it feels as if he has another gear or two in reserve.

The LFG can do things, touch speeds and go places no dune buggy has ever dared to venture

Its contradiction is that the car’s DNA comes from gently pottering to the beach and cruising across sand. Yet the LFG can do things, touch speeds and go places no dune buggy has ever dared to venture, and Richard insists that breadth of capability will not be wasted.

“A bit of a history lesson. In 1967, Myers Manx won the inaugural 1000 miles of Mexico, which is now the Baja 1000. We can go and do Baja 1000 – and we will – as a competitor, but why don’t we rerun the original route in a nicer way? While the Baja is going on over there, we’re planning to take 20 of these and do some great driving, but rather than marathon stages, sleeping in one man tents and eating tinned sardines, we can stay somewhere up the road a bit nicer.” Amen to that - and, should a co-driver be needed, he knows where to find me.