The Ford Transit Supervan is the worst tradie van ever

Back in the nineties, Formula 1 teams were swimming in cash because hundreds of millions of people watched the sport.

This was partly because you didn't have to pay to see it on telly, the racing was good, the politics hilarious and the engine suppliers didn't mind having a bit of fun.

To that end, Renault stuck an Espace body over a Williams F1 chassis and sent it on a European tour, mostly to make people laugh but it was also big enough to put the team owner, Sir Frank Williams and his wheelchair in it.

For Ford, doing this sort of thing was old news. The Transit Supervan was up to its third iteration by then.

The Supervan? What?

Yep. Back in 1971, Ford took a standard, pressed steel Transit bodyshell and dropped it over a Le Mans-winning GT40 chassis. It didn't like corners, so Ford stuck to amusing the punters with drag races and straight-line demos.

Then in 1984 Supervan 2 came out, based on a Ford C100 Group C race car chassis. The engine in this one was the long-distance variant of the mighty Cosworth DFV V8, known as the DFL. Debuting as part of the 1984 British Truck Racing Grand Prix, it had been tested around Silverstone at speeds up to 281km/h. As a promo tool, it only lasted a year because in 1985 the Mark 3 Transit came out and looked too different for spectators to make the link, so off to the museum it went.

Almost a decade later, Ford reclaimed Supervan 2 and converted it to Supervan 3. Unlike the first van, this one had almost nothing in common with the roadgoing Transit. For a start, a seven-eighths scale version of the body was made out of composites and the DFL was replaced with a Cosworth HB, the latest V8 F1 engine.

This engine was a 3.5-litre V8 that revved to a stratospheric (for the time, anyway) 13,000rpm and produced 522kW or 700bhp. That engine went on to power Michael Schumacher's Benetton and Ayrton Senna's five (and final) wins in 1993 while still at McLaren.

Again, the van went away for safekeeping before yet another engine, a rather less difficult to start and run Pro Sports 3000 V6. This one has a supercharger, though, so has a bit more power than the engine it's based on which was last seen in, among other things, a Ford Scorpio road car. Be careful when you Google image search that particular car, it makes the AU Falcon look like a design classic.

How does it go?

Top speed for the current spec Supervan 3 is around 250km/h, owing to a massive front splitter, deep side skirts and whopping rear wing.

What can it carry?

Uh, nothing. Driver and passenger. That's it. Oh, and a sign for when it's on display.

The whole front comes off (pictured) and you can see it's not your average Transit van underneath. But pop the tailgate, which needs two people, and you can see there's a whole lot of nothing up top until you find the engine among all the cross-bracing. There's no floor, no tie-rings, not even a hook to hang your hi-vis.

Back in the Cosworth HB days you needed an army of laptop-toting Cosworth engineers to start the thing, as well as a bunch of hardware that would be easier to carry if you could just bung it all in the back. That's why Ford ditched the HB and switched to the road car-based V6.

These days Supervan 3 comes out to play at Goodwood and Ford even lets the occasional journalist drive it. It lives at Ford's Heritage Collection on the site of the Dagenham factory complex, which is where we got to have a look.