The Saleen S7 Is the Craziest Supercar Nobody Knows About

This is a 2003 Saline S7 and is one of the few mid-engine

supercar

s to come out of the United States. Saline is a company located here in California and best known for tuning Ford Mustangs, but in the early 2000s they decided they wanted to build a

supercar

. own and that's this and it's crazy. I have borrowed this s7 from cnc motors here in southern california which is an exotic car dealership that has everything and I mean everything from bugatti to porsches ferrari to vintage exotic cars there is no end in sight . They have one of the most amazing showrooms of any car dealership in the world and you can visit them if you click the links in the description below, so it's no surprise that they have this one: The saline s7 made its debut way back in the year 2000 and at that time it was basically the first mid-engined supercar made in America, unless you count vector which made cars in very small numbers, not that the s7 is exactly common, this car was made until 2007 and Saline reportedly only made about 100 examples of this car.

Including both street cars and race cars, not that there is much distinction because the s7 is basically a race car with just a VIN number and a license plate. The s7 uses a modified 7 liter Ford V8 and early S7 models like this had 550 horsepower which apparently wasn't enough for the brine because in 2005 they released the twin turbo s7 with 750 horsepower, that car supposedly could reach almost 250 miles per hour now, since this is not the twin turbo, this car is not as fast, but the numbers are still amazing 0-60 in 3.3 seconds and a saline claimed this would reach a top speed of 220 miles per hour.

Those numbers are still tremendously impressive today and they were truly impressive almost 20 years ago when this car came out, but those numbers are not mine. A favorite little fact about the Saline S7. My favorite fact is that Saline claimed that this car was so good at sticking to the road that if you reached a certain speed it generated more downforce than the car actually weighed, meaning you could theoretically drive it. the other way around, if you reached a certain speed, I remember in high school when this car was out, I heard that statistic and thought if I was really rich like Bill Gates, I would build a loop track in the desert and unfortunately test it.

It's not going to happen, but I'll settle for this. Today I'm going to show you the s7 and show you all the cool quirks and interesting features of one of the most amazing supercars that no one really

knows

about. A lot about this and I'm going to give it a full review and for more of my thoughts click the link below to visit autotrader.com oversteer where I've also put together a list of the most expensive American cars currently on sale on autotrader. Ah, the S7. I've always wanted to get up close and personal with this car, so it's time to look at quirks and features that start with simply unlocking the doors.

Incredibly, this is the factory key fob you get with the S7. It has four buttons each. which are labeled one to four with roman numerals for some reason, now to unlock the doors you press button number one, pretty simple, but number two locks the doors and then things get weird. Button number three opens only the driver's door. Button number four opens only the passenger door. door so you can unlock the doors individually if you want, but upgrade once you've unlocked the doors individually, check this out, press button three and you'll be able to open the driver's door with the push of a button, looking cool walking towards your saline . as the door opens automatically press button four the same way on the passenger side the door opens automatically it lifts up and it gets even stranger if you hold buttons three and four together the door opens trunk and if you hold down the buttons one. and two together, open the front compartment, so this car has a remote control like a normal car, but the functions of the remote control are anything but normal, so we move on to the front compartment, which I will unlock by holding buttons one and two, it opens, then you go down and there is an actual release mechanism and then it opens and what you will find is that it is a small storage compartment, not huge, but a storage compartment is always a welcome sight in a supercar, a quite interesting element.

About this particular storage compartment, the bottom is carbon fiber, the top is suede. Now every other exotic car storage compartment I've been in has that reversed, the bottom is suede because that's where you put your stuff and the top is carbon. Fiber because the panel itself is carbon fiber and the exposed carbon looks cool, but not this car in this car, they've flipped them. Next we move on to perhaps the most characteristic detail of this car and you can see it perfectly from that camera angle. the large number of vents or gills on the side of this car now i counted them there are five separate locations on each side of the car where these gills exist you have a group of them in front of the front wheels you have a group of them above the front wheels you have a group behind the front wheels you have another group in front of the engine and then you have a final group behind the engine on that body panel at the rear there are five separate locations on both sides 10 groups of gills on the side of the s7, now I counted that there are 50 individual little gill openings on this car, 25 on each side, which sounds ridiculous, but I have to admit just looking at this car it looks pretty cool and those gills are part of what gives it the look of a car that It appears to be going 200 miles per hour even though it's just standing still.

Another interesting element on the exterior, apart from all the gills, there are two functional air intakes. There's one right here in the front trunk that looks fake, but it actually goes inside a tube inside the car and then there's one over the top of the windshield that goes back to the engine and brings air to the engine in the back. Both also contribute to the cool looks of this car, but no. Everything about the design of this car is cool or particularly special and with that I turned to the taillights. Now you look at these taillights and you might think I know them from somewhere.

Yes, the Lamborghini Diablo used these same taillights. The first Pagani Zonda also made the Spiker C8 and also the SSC Ultimate Arrow and also many buses and trucks. These lights are made by one supplier and are generic and fit many government requirements, so automakers who don't necessarily have the money to develop their own lights and comply with all the regulations, can just go and pick them up, for example. What several old-school supercars and trucks share are these taillights, although it's interesting that some of the automakers that used these taillights integrated them. reverse lights in saline, for some reason I decided not to do that, instead the reverse lights on the s7 are down here, in this kind of weird place above the license plate, there are two right next to the another and like any other car it turns white when you put the s7 in reverse.

Now, next, we move on to the trunk, which I have already opened by pressing the three and four key fob buttons together. Once you've done that, open it up and you should see it fine. It's a trunk, which is a good trick because I already showed you the trunk of this car. It has two trunks, which makes it relatively practical, although that's not exactly a word I would use to describe this car, but at least in this case it's true now that you understand it. Coming back here, you'll notice a couple of interesting items. One is the fact that, again, you have carbon fiber on the bottom and suede on top, so you put the item you want to carry in the trunk on top of the carbon fiber, not on it. suede, which is a strange decision, but apparently it's one they're committed to now in the trunk, you'll also notice that the battery is not in the factory location, as you can imagine, based on the fact that there is a hole that it goes from the battery to the engine, but the factory battery location, they told me you have to remove a wheel just to get to the battery, which is obviously incredibly annoying, so on this car at some point they probably relocated the battery to make it easier to access so you don't have to do all that, you can also see this yellow cable attached to the battery, which is responsible for leaving the battery charging if the car is stopped for a while.

None of that, however, is the most interesting thing about the rear trunk. The problem is that there is an emergency release latch on the trunk, so if you get stuck here you can open it and then pull it out in case someone tries to kidnap you in their saline S7. The problem is that the emergency release latch is inside the engine compartment. which can't be accessed from the trunk, you can see that the latch has a picture of a trunk opening and a guy running away, but it's not actually in the trunk where you could access it if you get stuck in the truck.

I guess the reason is this. What happened is because Saline wanted a secondary manual release for the trunk beyond the electronic release on the key fob, so they thought there is a manual release that basically already does what we want, even though it's supposed to go inside the trunk. we're just going to reuse it and put it somewhere else so there's a manual way to open the trunk, so they just used those latches, although that's not specifically what they were designed for, now there's two other interesting items with the rear trunk. One here is the fact that as you can see when you lift the trunk it actually splits the spoiler in two, there are additional spoiler pieces on top of the tail lights that stay in place and then you have a piece on the trunk that goes up. with the trunk.

It's strange that on many cars that have a similar situation they only have the complete spoiler along with the trunk, but on this car they made the spoiler in three different pieces, which is quite unusual. Another interesting element in the back is the fact that this car has a backup camera it's right here above the salt fountain, you have this little circular camera placed here, very small, but it has one that would have been very important in the year 2000, when this car first came out, basically nothing had a backup camera back then, but this car was supposed to be cool and modern and futuristic, so it has one and then we move on to the engine and there you see, it's Ford's seven-liter V8 with 550 horsepower is absolutely enormous and then, in the twin-turbo models, they have two. turbochargers for 750 horsepower is crazy, this is obviously something really impressive to see, especially nowadays the days of these supercars with giant engine and manual transmission are over.

One thing I like here, obviously, the cover over the engine is like it's glass. it was on a lot of supercars from this era and still today, but I like the fact that there are also two side windows back here that also allow you to look into the engine bay, but from a different perspective, actually on the roof of the s7 There are only as many windows facing the engine compartment as you can see from the passenger compartment. Now next we move on to entering the Salinas S7, where there are a couple of interesting elements, one being the fact that there is a rather large exposed keyhole.

Right here on the door, but as you can see, there's no handle on the door, so how do you get into this thing? Well below this line, there is a small silver circular button. You press it and then it releases the door, which goes up in this cool way, precisely. As befits the supercar that this vehicle is now, once the door is up you can see one crazy thing about this car is how wide the door sill is, it's like two feet of door sill, obviously, that it's because the whole structure of the car is placed in here and they wanted this to be as tight and rigid as possible and that's why you have this huge door cell that you have to climb over when you enter the s7, then another element on the s7 door sill before We move inside now, here you can see there is a latch which is pretty standard on the door and next to it is a silver circular thing, so what is it exactly?

That's another emergency entrance to the trunk, if you pull it, it will explode. the trunk and there is also one in the front next to the front door hinge. Pulling on that circle will open the front hood and give you access if you can't get in any other way once you get inside. the s7 and you can see that it is quite tight here there are several interesting quirks and features, as you would expect, starting with the handbrake, the parking brakehandbrake is located to the left of the driver's seat, between the driver's seat and the door sill, which is common on older supercars, but not so common today, you also have right next to the handbrake a small storage area, again finished in suede, so that whatever you're storing in there doesn't fly away, now next to the storage compartment there.

They have two buttons, one is to open the trunk and the other is to open the engine compartment, both in the rear. I already showed you that you can do it with the remote, but obviously, if you're driving the car, if you're in the interior, it's easier to just press a button instead of using the key fob, so those buttons release those two elements. . Now the next interesting element is the seat itself and specifically the fact that it is fixed in place, there are no rails on the seat that you can't. move the seat forward or backward like in a racing car the seat is fixed in place you can move the steering wheel up or down but the seat itself does not move this is one of those cars that when you buy it you assume You have to go to the factory and they measure you and then reconfigure the interior of the car based on your size, so if you don't fit in one of these, you have to bring a technician here to help you.

Move the seat to a different position, don't you can just pull a latch and move the seat back now if you're wondering why, I guess all three save weight, it's one less thing you have to put in the car, saves a little weight, but to me it's crazy not having a moveable seat in a car, that's the situation with the s7 anyway. Another interesting thing, the s7, something I always found absolutely ridiculous with this car is the fact that the turn signals are standard. Fresh out of the Ford parts bin, it's right in focus and the same with the freshly out of focus wiper stone or a toroid or whatever strong they made in those days, now switches are expensive to produce and that's why that smaller volume automakers turn to larger ones.

High volume automakers to get switches like Tesla went to Mercedes-Benz but despite that I always made fun of the saline s7, this crazy expensive supercar for having Ford Focus turn signals until I bought my Ford GT , also has Ford Focus turn signals. Needless to say, Don't make fun of this car anymore. Next we move on to the steering wheel which really looks like the steering wheel that you would expect to find in a racing car and you will see that there is no airbag there which is a surprise because in the United States all cars are required to have bags airbags and have been since 1998 and this is later, but Saline was able to negotiate a small-volume automaker exemption to the airbag regulation by arguing that it would be expensive to put them in this car. and it's not dramatically risky anyway, since they are going to make very few of these, so they were exempt from the airbag requirement for both driver and passenger.

That being said, the steering wheel has a normal component where you would expect the horn to be. In the middle you have the

saleen

logo, you push it and you hear the horn of this car and if you have ever wanted to know what the horn sounds like on a saline s7, here you go, now, next we move on to the indicators where you will win. I don't find anything particularly interesting, the tachometer is in the middle, like in many sports cars, you have the speedometer on the left, it goes up to 240. My favorite, however, is on the right, you have the fuel gauge and the temperature of the engine.

It's not that surprising, but I like the fact that they have printed on their premium fuel a lot of times automakers will print that on the gas tank, but not in saline. They have that on the actual fuel gauge, the premium fuel also has a small direction indicator. where the fuel door is on my car it just has a picture of a gas tank and then an arrow, but on this car it literally says fuel door with an arrow. I guess they thought people weren't smart enough to figure out the more subtle directions. Next you go on to start the S7, like in most cars there is a small ignition switch to the right of the steering wheel, you put the key in, turn it and then it starts, except it doesn't, you actually have to go through one more.

Step to the left of the steering wheel there is a button marked engine start, you press it and that is what actually starts the engine and with that in mind, let's listen to a couple of revs of the saline s7 and now, let's move on to the center console of this car There are a couple of other interesting elements here, one is the center storage compartments, the one that is further back and is hinged towards the driver, so the passenger can't really access them, but the driver can, and inside him you will find the remote control, this car has a remote control because it comes standard from the factory with this little Kenwood saline screen, they didn't have the money to develop their own proprietary saline radio screen, so it has the Kenwood screen, but the benefit of That was It allowed Saline to have that rear view camera since they could wire it through the Kenwood system.

It looks aftermarket, but there are really no other interesting elements now. In the middle you will see directly in front of that storage compartment. You have a little button for the hazard lights press that and they come on pretty simply up top you have the window switches on the left and right and then a button marked u and l. What's that? It's a lock button, unlock and lock now, why didn't they just use a picture of a? lock and a picture of a lock unlocked like any other car we may never know the story may be lost to time why Saline decided that you and I was preferable to the little pictures now above that on the left is in control pretty standard mirror and then I have a couple of climate controls, the rest of the climate controls are in the center and are pretty normal, the one on the left changes the airflow, the one in the middle changes the temperature and the one on the right changes where the air comes out, none of that is very strange, but there is one strange element with the climate controls and that is the fact that this car only has two climate vents in the cabin, these two directly in the middle below the climate controls and apparently that's it, Celine.

I didn't want to put the tubes for the vents on the sides of the passenger compartment, so you just have those two little vents in the middle, that's all you have now. The next interesting element in this car is the footwells, which are just right. Crazy, the reason I'm sitting like this is because even though I have enough room and even enough headroom, I don't have enough room for my legs. feet because of how ridiculously offset the footwells are when you get into this car, you have a normal amount of room for the width of the seat, but then as you go forward it basically becomes a small spot to the footwells where you can put your feet.

They are incredibly ridiculously small. I have never seen anything like it and to illustrate how narrow. You take a look at the shape, when it's out of the car you can see it starts out normal and gets progressively narrower as you get into the footwell, absolutely ridiculous and makes sitting in this car, even as a passenger, be relatively uncomfortable and By the way, the displaced footwell thing is especially crazy because of the pedals. If you look at the driver's side you can see that the footwell goes up to that point and that means the pedals are basically on the right side of the footwell, so in your car you're used to just driving and pressing the pedals and having your legs straight in this car, you basically sit down and then you turn your legs to the right so you can reach the pedals, it's crazy, two other interesting elements.

The card doesn't have a glove box, there is no glove box on the Saline S7, although that's not really a surprise, a lot of cars like this don't have a glove box and remember they included two trunks just so you can put things in. Another thing this car doesn't have is an interior rearview mirror. There isn't one up there and it's not like they ripped it out. I don't see a gap where it would have been or any dirt on the windshield where it would have been. it's stuck so maybe it didn't have one now, interestingly the owner's manual describes an interior rear view mirror but maybe it was an option and not everyone understood it since it says there are mirrors in the sun visors, you leave them fall and you can see your mirrors on the passenger and driver side so that when you drive your s7 you can look at yourself.

Finally we move on to a surprising item that I did not expect to find in this car and that would be the owner's manual, now the owner's manual for this car is very direct and simple, but it has to be that they have condensed everything into about 50 pages or less . What I find especially funny about the owner's manual is that, although it's largely just an illustrated book with pictures of the s7 like 40 of the owner's manual just has these brilliant pictures of the s7 on repeat, but there are a couple of interesting elements here where it explains how to do things and on the first page there is a nice little note from steve

saleen

the The founder of the company tells you to enjoy your s7 now, since I'm in this area, I want to talk about the fuel door, which It's a little more unusual than the fuel door you'll find on basically every other vehicle, so for starters.

In the opening process, you can see that they have printed the words "lift to open" on the outside of the fuel door, lift that little cover and you will find a keyhole. Now each s7 was delivered with two keys, a short key and a long key. the short key goes into this little keyhole on the fuel door and then opens it, you turn the key and then the fuel door opens. Now there is an interesting element with the keys, you can't get the key out of the fuel door until you close it again and lock it, which is a bit annoying because it means that when you lower the fuel door you have no choice but to let the key hang on the paint, you have to be very careful with it but anyway When you are done filling your s7 with fuel you will need to push the fuel door up until you hear a click and then you can turn the key to lock it and take out the key.

Push the cap back on and fuel. The door is complete and those are the quirks and features of the Saline S7 and now it's time to take it out on the road and see how it drives, except it's not because it doesn't fit in this car and because I know you. People love to see this. Here is a small compilation of my attempts. Curiously, the problem is not the very narrow pedal box. Someone suggested I take off my shoes and I was able to stick my feet in there. The problem is rather the fact that the seat is too much.

Way ahead, as I mentioned, you would buy this car and then they take it back to the factory and they fit it to your size. The previous owner must have been smaller, so he had the seat moved forward to make it fit, but I didn't. I can't actually put my legs in there and put my butt in the seat to drive this car. This has never happened before in five years of filming these videos. I fit in the BMW. Said. I fit in the Alfa Romeo 4c. I drove a Lotus Elise across the country, from California to Georgia, years ago, even before I started doing YouTube stuff, and it fit in that car too.

It fit in the back seat of basically everything, countless 911s, the Nissan GTR, the Ferrari California T and the Portofino, even. The kuvale means I like everything and yet I can't get into the saline s7. Interestingly, the seat clearly has a couple of extra inches where it could go back and then it could go in. Headroom is okay, legroom seems okay, it's just the fact. which is just too far ahead and that's all we got with the Saleen s7 when this car was new the original price was something like 400k the twin turbo ones were like 600k it was totally crazy but if you take a look look at The numbers and top speed this car could reach made some sense and this is probably one of the most forgotten 400,000 supercars in existence.

That being said, Saline claims that they are going to release a more modern version of this car and an updated version. version they will bring back and sell as a new car again and if that happens I can't wait to try it out and drive it assuming it fits, if not a shorter youtuber will have to do the job for me but for now this is it as good as it looks