The Garagisti & Co. GP1 is a new supercar startup looking to the past for inspiration.
The planned car has no turbos or hybridization, just a screaming V12 and a manual transmission.
While it's still in the rendering stage, key players are on board, from Maserati V-12 experts to folks from Brembo and Öhlins.
Building and selling a small economy car profitably is tricky to do. Founding a successful EV startup is hard too. Nowadays, the top-tier difficulty for a car company is probably trying to make an affordable sports car to please enthusiasts. But the million-dollar supercar market? You've got more choice than the gluten-free section at a Whole Foods.
Yet there are still some niches to be explored. With Ferrari and Lamborghini both embracing hybrid power for their V12-powered models—and Ferrari dismissing the idea of building a manual transmission-equipped car any time soon—there's still an opening for something powered by 12-cylinders and with a stick-shift gearbox. Arguably, that's the role of Gordon Murray's GMA T.50, but that is more a British take on a supercar rather than an Italian one.
Garagisti & Co. is a new company founded in the United Kingdom, but most of its elements are as Italian as gelato. Company founder Mario Escudero bought a 1990 Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary Edition last year and promptly tripled the mileage on it. Despite being a very rare and original model painted Arancia Miura orange, he road-tripped it to the very northernmost part of Scotland and on a pilgrimage out to Lamborghini's birthplace of Sant'Agata, racking up about 8000 miles in one year.
The GP1 manual supercar envisioned by Escudero weaves in a full carbon-fiber body styled by a former Bugatti designer, and it features a V-12 heart from the people behind the Maserati MC12 GT1. Displacing 6.6 liters, the V-12 is targeted to redline at 9000 rpm and generate 789 horsepower. Considering the GP1's claimed dry curb weight is just over 2200 pounds, performance should pin your ears back plenty.
Best of all, you'll have to work a bit to extract the car's best. Besides eschewing turbocharging and hybridization, the GP1 also ditches any thoughts of dual-clutch gearboxes, instead opting for an old-school six-speed manual from well-respected supplier Xtrac.
The rest of the GP1 also seems to be signing the best of the industry's specialist suppliers, with Brembo brakes and an Öhlins suspension. The shape itself is slightly reminiscent of Escudero's Countach, wingless and massively vented, capable of producing about the same downforce as a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, but without that car's obvious aerodynamic add-ons.
With just 25 of these cars projected for production, each set to cost more than $3 million, it's easy enough to shrug with supercar fatigue. However, Garagisti & Co. is at least run by the kind of person who does what we all hope we'd do if we could afford a supercar: drive it until the rear engine cover starts blistering from the heat.
Here's hoping that the GP1 passes the rendering and planning stage and goes into production, and that at least a few of the owners who are lucky enough to own one follow in Escudero's supercar-road-tripping footsteps.
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