The Middle East is a land where the oil is rich, skyscrapers tall and the thirst for expensive cars is insatiable. Don’t belive us? Just check out this showroom. But they’ve never had a car of their own… until now. Actually, next week, where at the Qatar Motor Show, the first ever hypercar from the Arab world is set to be unveiled.
Called the LykanHypersport - which sounds a bit like Luke Skywalker’s latest daily driver - it wants to go wheel-to-wheel with the Bugattis and Koenigseggs of the world.
With a 750bhp, twin-turbo flat-six wedged in behind the driver, the LykanHypersport can apparently hit 60mph in 2.8 seconds (that’s faster than an Aventador) and on to a ‘break neck’ (their words, not ours) top speed of 242mph. Ouch.
But this isn’t just a fast car: it’s also a fast, luxurious car. With diamond-encrusted LED lights, gold-stitched leather, suicide doors and a state-of-the-art 3D Virtual Holographic Display with Tactile Interaction and a revolutionary LD4Motion interactive dashboard (yeah, us neither), it’s… blingy.
That’s not all. Like J-Lo, the car comes with a 24-hour dedicated concierge service and a free $200,000 special edition Cyrus Klepcy watch. Only seven will be produced, though we’ll believe it when we actually see it in the flesh next week.
It’s official: the Hennessey Venom GT is the fastest car to accelerate from 0-300km/h… in the world.
You already knew the Texan-built FrankenLotus was a little bundle of unholy firepower, but now the dinky nuke has burned its name into the record books. Specifically, the Guinness Book of World Records; a representative was officially on hand during a record-run along Ellington Field in Houston to clock the Venom’s raucous acceleration.
The GT, powered by a twin-turbocharged 7.0-litre aluminium V8, took just 13.63 seconds to hit 186mph. That’s not quick, that’s Quick.
If you’ve read the Guinness Book of World Records recently, you’ll know that Koenigsegg’s Agera R is fast. And very accomplished at stopping. But you probably don’t know what the Swedish hypercar sounds - and looks - like when it’s doing 250mph. Thankfully, there are people with camera phones to sate our curiosity.
Last week Koenigesegg got wind of an event on the Nurburgring and decided to take its Official Test Car, 7031 Streetfighter, plus the one that broke all the world records, to see what they could do on the Green Hell.
Click on the videoy bit and you’ll see a standard Agera R pounding down the 3.5 kilometer Döttinger Höhe straight hitting 401.6 km/h (250mph in TopGear maths) before having to brake for the bridge at Tiergarten.
Lambo may have stolen the Geneva Motor Show with this. It’s real, it’s a one-off and it is stunning:
It is, in Lambo’s own words, a “radically open automobile”, and they’re not wrong. The Lamborghini Aventador J - so named because of the FIA’s ‘Appendix J’ referencing the tech spec of race cars - dispenses with the roof and windscreen of the hypercar for a unique driving experience.
It’s based on the standard Aventador LP700-4, replete with that 6.5-litre 700bhp V12 and permanent four-wheel-drive. Top Gear’s Supercar of the Year, no less. But for the ‘J’, the carbon fibre monocoque was significantly altered to adjust for the lack of anything above the doors. It’s made of woven carbon fibres soaked with epoxy resin that apparently stabilises the structure but keeps the material soft - almost like a high-tech fabric.
There are two safety bars behind the seats, which themselves are made of forged composite with carbon fibre fabric inserts, and because the Lambo ‘J’ is sans roof, air conditioning and windscreen, it’s lighter than the 1,575kg Aventador coupe. So expect an improvement on the standard Aventador’s 0-62mph time of 2.9 seconds.
Read all the beautiful details at TopGear.com
Here’s another early reveal from next month’s Geneva Motor Show and this one is a beaut — The Bugatti Veyron Vitesse. The most powerful factory built roadster IN THE WORLD:
So, what sort of numbers does a convertible need to be the fastest in the world? 1184bhp and 1105lb ft. That’s 197bhp and 183lb ft up from the cooking variety Veyron’s 987bhp and 922lb ft. Or roughly one Golf GTI more…
Extra power’s been teased out of the 16-cylinder engine by enlarging the four - FOUR - turbochargers and intercoolers. The chassis’s also been beefed up to support the extra muscle.No performance stats have been released yet, but if it’s anything like the Veyron Super Sport, it’ll hover around 2.5 seconds to 62mph. That’s 0.2 seconds faster than the current Grand Sport. Pricing’s equally mysterious, but we reckon it’ll be in the region of $3.3M.
Remember it? Of course you do. It’s the 6.5-litre, V12 powered 650bhp ode to everything that Lamborghini stands for. Carbon fibre excess? Check. Big, hugely intimidating and shouty body? Check. Raucous engine note capable of spontaneously combusting nearby wildlife? Check.
This particular one is being offered by Surrey-based SuperVettura car sales, and is reported as being car number 18; that’s 18 from a build run of just 20, remember, originally destined for “Lamborghini friends and collectors”.
The price? A bargain at just $1.3M.
Deets at TopGear.com
Click through for the hi-res versions.
Ok. We’ve got a few responses to our “What’s the most expensive supercar crash?” question. Here’s the first: man drives his Bugatti Veyron into a lake.
We can’t decide whether it’s hugely coincidental that some good ol’ boys just so happened to be filming the Bug moments before it crashed into the lake… or completely understandable. It’s a super-rare exotic supercar, right? You’d have done the same, wouldn’t you?
We also can’t decide whether it’s hugely coincidental that the driver has been identified by local media as the owner of a company that restores wrecked supercars for resale.
Hennessey plans to build five Venom GTs and two are already spoken for (including the car pictured). Cost: $1.1M. Want one?
