It was powered by 1.0-litre Yamaha motorcycle engine and came complete with its sequential transmission, so you did with your hand what riders would have done with their feet had the powertrain been mounted on a bike. One forward, the rest back, if memory serves. It was also fitted with an unusual reverse gear which essentially reversed all the forward gears, allowing the car to travel as quickly going backward as forward, enabling my lunatic friend Colin Goodwin to earn a line in Guinness’s good book for reaching 104mph while looking over his shoulder.
If the car had a problem, it was that there wasn’t much point driving it unless you were going as fast as you could on perfect roads. I remember taking it to North Yorkshire in the spring of 1992, feeling a bit of twit wearing a helmet and not much enjoying the drone up the A1. Because its engine displaced a mere 1,002cc yet developed 145PS (107kW) – an unprecedented specific output for a road car engine at that time and better today even than that fitted to the likes of the 6.5-litre V12 in the Ferrari 812 Competizione – you had to have 8,500rpm on the clock just to get it to do its stuff. At normal road car revs it had very little pull indeed.
But once you got it there, oh my goodness. I remember we took a Caterham along, fitted with a 2.0-litre, 177PS (130kW) motor and the Rocket made it feel ponderous. Between 8,500rpm and peak power arriving at 11,000rpm it was the most exciting thing I’d driven. And because it was so light – we weighed it at 400kg dead – and because Gordon had designed it, it was astonishingly softly sprung, so just breathed its way effortlessly across the landscape, leaving the Caterham far behind.