Dutch courage: Driving the 592bhp lightweight coming to UK roads

One of Donkervoort’s display cars from the Goodwood Festival of Speed has been lent to me for the day; to depart in from the South Downs, howl north and west in along a mix of trunk roads, and end up on some well-known A- and B-roads on Salisbury Plain. 

It’s a German-registered left-hooker, as you might have noticed, but let’s call that an inconvenient detail. This will be our first drive full stop in a car that is now an awfully long way from a Lotus Seven, and which British enthusiasts will soon have a much better chance of getting to know first hand.

The P24 RS is about 20% longer than a Lotus or Caterham Seven and a good foot wider. It’s the inheritor of a line of cars that was actually pretty quick to grow beyond the footprint of the original Seven: first with the S8 of 1983, then again with the D8 of 1993, then again with the D8 GT of 2007 and so on. We can probably thank the celebrated physical height of the Dutch for that. If you’ve ever felt a size too big and tall for a Seven-style car (insufficiently Chapman-esque in stature, if you prefer), you might be particularly grateful for that, as I am.

Then again, the P24 RS isn’t actually any bigger than the F22 of 2022 – Donkervoort’s last really big technical development. The company has long sought to adopt lightweight materials in order to offset the influence of any additional mass that its slightly inflated Seven-style cars might otherwise bring. With the F22, however, this philosophy hit another gear, with its own ‘Ex-Core’ carbonfibre parts comprising big sections of a chassis ‘hybrid’ made of alloy spaceframe tube and stressed carbonfibre sandwich mouldings. That chassis delivered double the torsional rigidity of a D8-generation Donkervoort and yet still brought the car in at a dry weight of 750kg.

The P24 RS, introduced earlier this year, adds to that total a little bit, but with a distinguishing justification. The previous car’s blown five-cylinder Audi engine has been dispensed with, and in its place comes a special version of the 3.5-litre V6 that powered the latest Ford GT, using parallel-twin, ball-bearing turbochargers from Dutch Formula 1 supplier Van der Lee.

Overall output has taken a big hike over where it was with the F22 - from 493bhp to 592bhp - and, unlike the Audi lump, the Ford one mounts entirely symmetrically ‘north-south’ within the long, insectile snout of the car. It’s that last fact that opened up the necessary space to move the car’s steering system across the frontal package, which means Donkervoort can offer it in either left - or right-hand-drive.

Elsewhere, some parts of the P24 RS are innovative and technically interesting, others deliberately not so much. Because Donkervoort likes to keep some things analogue and traditional, it uses a Tremec TKX five-speed manual gearbox; and it passes up electronically controlled active torque-vectoring across its driven rear axle in favour of a Torsen mechanical torque-biasing differential. With nearly 600bhp at its disposal, Donkervoort recognises the need for electronic traction control here - but there’s no electronic stability control. Anti-lock brakes and electromechanical power steering are options; this test car has the latter but not the former.

The P24 RS does use a semi-active suspension system, however, with 35mm of hydraulic ride-height adjustment. Its six-stage adaptive dampers have sufficient roll-cancelling functionality to negate the need for conventional anti-roll bars. That sounds interesting.

I depart the village of Charlton, just north of Goodwood Racecourse, with the heat of a sweltering July day building. I’m unexpectedly comfortable, albeit rather warm. 

One of the systems left off this Donkervoort demonstrator for the sake of weight-saving, the man from Donkervoort tells me as I turn the key in the ignition barrel, was air conditioning. Oh good. With the targa roof stowed and lots of glossy carbonfibre around the cabin to reflect the heat, it feels a little bit like I’m a chicken breast in an air fryer when I come to a stop at traffic lights. The heat from the engine compartment slowly floods over my feet, there’s suddenly no passing air to cool me down. I expect I’ll need about fifteen minutes of this, at what feels something like Gas Mark Four, to be ready to eat.

Buying advice item number one would seem to be ‘have the air conditioning’, then. But it’s an impressive cabin. There’s plenty of room at the wheel, even for all 6ft 3in and rather too many stones of yours truly. The seat runners afford plenty of adjustment and loads of leg room. The steering wheel is removable to help you on your way past the dihedral-style doors and into the seat. The bucket seat itself is surprisingly wide and comfortable and can be set lower, even, than it was in this test car, for those who like a bit more shelter from the wind. Elsewhere, the shape of the interior door panels makes outboard elbow room just a little bit tight, although that really is the only way in which the driving position in this four-metre-long sports car feels at all squeezed in.

On the move, you get an intriguing mix of signals from the P24 RS. Twiddle the small, knurled metallic damping control knob down to zero and the suspension slackens off fully. Then push the top of the same knob and the hydraulic struts raise the ride height up to ‘High’, which Donkervoort advises you use for road driving. 

Thus set, the car is unexpectedly easy work to drive. The steering is remarkably light and manageable (provided you have that optional electromechanical power assistance). The ride is flat but quite buoyant and not at all tetchy or firm – until bigger, sharper inputs test the limits of the travel, at least. At normal speeds, there’s an appealing, albeit not entirely abiding, Lotus-like flow about the way the car travels along, and enough body movement that you can easily judge how hard the tyres are working and what the road surface is doing. It’s nicely charismatic in that front-engined, rear-driven, classic-roadster vein.

The powertrain, however, is a different case entirely. The manual gearbox is needy: the shift  action is heavy, short-throw, notchy and mechanical-feeling, the clutch pedal is long and medium-heavy and the whole thing is sensitive to good shift timing, rev-matching and general mechanical sympathy. Honestly, it’s deliciously anachronistic for 2026 – and quite wonderful for it.

The ratios feel hilariously long. First is very much for driving, not manoeuvring. Second will take you well beyond town speeds. And you won’t need fourth until you’re cruising on a motorway. Beyond that, the ratios are set so that the engine hits 6000rpm in fifth at its claimed top speed: 186mph (whereas most modern, two-pedal automatic sports cars run out of revs in fifth somewhere between 135- and 150mph). 

That all takes a little bit of mental processing. There’s loads of torque and a boosty sort of delivery in the feistier driving modes, so you just pick a ratio, stick with it, hold on tight and let the engine slug it out. The last manual sports car I drove with ratios that felt this long but which still felt anything like as fast might have been a Corvette Z06; before that, probably a TVR Tuscan. They don’t come along often.

A drivetrain like that ought to make the P24 RS’s engine the headline act in its driving experience, of course. Is the V6 quite that good? I’m not sure. It’s potent, without doubt, and not backwards coming forwards - but it doesn’t quite have the bristling, histrionic intent you expect in a car as mad as this. It can sound a bit flat at times, as V6s tend to. Otherwise, well, it’s just not the fast-revving straight six or gargling muscle-car V8 that I can’t help thinking this car deserves.

Later in the day, on those testing Salisbury Plain roads we know well and where we can push the P24 RS at least a little bit closer to its dynamic limits, one or two other ‘works in progress’ emerge. In High ride mode, at least, that light steering I mentioned earlier can make the car a bit of an act of faith to commit to a corner – although it does get a little easier and more intuitive as you wind up the adaptive dampers. 

Having done that, though, the formerly fluent ride becomes a little unyielding, the dampers struggling to deal with bigger, sharper intrusions without sending shocks and clatters through the suspension top mounts; and tending to ‘freeze’ when loaded up with cornering forces and then asked to deal with vertical inputs simultaneously.

With niche sports cars like this, customers are willing to overlook the odd dynamic quirk and wrinkle. They don’t expect immaculately reproduced, homologated perfection, and the P24 RS will give them an over-abundance of character and rawness.