Venturi’s Atlantique 300 and the Racing Program That Outlived It

In October 1994, at the Mondial de l’Automobile in Paris, a Scottish businessman who had owned a French sports car company for roughly seven months pulled the wraps off a car his people had designed in six. Hubert O’Neill had taken over Venturi that March, succeeding Didier Primat of the Primat-Schlumberger family investment group Primwest, and he arrived with two projects already forming. One was the 400 GT, a road-legal version of Venturi’s own race car. The other was a comprehensive rework of the Atlantique, the mid-engined coupe the company had been building since 1991 at its factory in Couëron, west of Nantes.

The reworked car was called the Atlantique 300, and by any reasonable measure it was the best road car Venturi ever built. Seventy of them exist. The company that made them was liquidated sixteen months after the Paris debut, sold whole for roughly the retail price of three of the cars, and by 2000 it had stopped building gasoline-powered vehicles entirely. What survived, oddly enough, was not the car. It was the racing series that helped bankrupt the company in the first place.