Prodrive, the Banbury-based race car builder and technology company, has confirmed that it has begun developing what it believes will be the world’s first ‘desert hypercar’ for private sale and aims to have a prototype running by the end of this year.
When complete, the super-exclusive machine is expected to find buyers at more than £1 million apiece.
David Richards, Prodrive’s founder and CEO, has confirmed exclusively to Autocar that the new car will be built at its HQ in Banbury by Prodrive’s own team of engineers and technicians, who have built many specialist and competition cars over the years and who are currently responsible for the Le Mans class-winning Aston Martin GT cars that race around the world.
The new Dakar-derived hypercar project (likely to be sold as the ‘Hunter’) is a direct result of the company’s debut success in January’s Dakar Rally, held in Saudi Arabia. The best-placed of its two Bahraini-backed BRX racers, driven by Spanish desert race specialist Nani Roma, finished fifth outright.
The Hunter, which Richards referred to as “the Ferrari of the desert” when he first mentioned the idea last year, has a body designed by distinguished ex-Jaguar chief Ian Callum. Richards said the road car’s appearance will be clearly related to the Dakar car (also a Callum design) but its body will be widened to take larger wheels and tyres.
The car will have broadly the same dimensions, suspension and structure as the competition car and will be powered by the same Ford-derived 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 engine, which has undergone extensive development in Prodrive’s workshops. Its extra power results from early work on the Dakar cars, when technicians discovered that the power limit allowed for the competition, around 400bhp, was fairly easy to exceed.
Richards explained: “When we first had the road car idea, we were thinking of building a detuned version, but since January we’ve decided to go the other way, giving it around 500bhp – even more power than the race cars – plus a sophisticated transmission and a fully designed interior.
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Since it'll be called Hunter, will it:
Be a crack pipe user?
Snog and have sex with its deceased siblings' wife?
Have backdoor and clandestine relations with Ukraine?
Take monies from Energy Cos?
Have a dad who is POTUS?
Not really a new concept. The Mega Track in 1992 was a very high performance off-road vehicle with a 408bhp Mercedes-Benz V12 in same state of tune a the Pagani Zonda (Testarossa had 390bhp that time), cost a big fortune, was super accelerative.