DREAM TEAM

The Kimera K39 is a new Italian hypercar with the heart of a Koenigsegg.

- WORDS JACK RIX

Where do we sign? As collabs go this is right up there with Aerosmith x Run-DMC, Louis Vuitton x Supreme... maybe even TopGear x Twiglets (RIP Stiglets). It’s a seismic news story, a tantalising engineering proposition, but mostly a ringing endorsement from the hypercar godfather to a little known Italian upstart. Christian von Koenigsegg doesn’t hand out the beating heart of his company to just anyone... therefore the Kimera K39 must be legit.

We’ll get to Christian and Luca Betti’s budding bromance in a bit, but first, what is the K39? Keen readers will know this isn’t Kimera’s first rodeo. Its first two models – the EVO37 and EVO38 – are restomods (hence the ‘EVO’ prefix) paying tribute to the Lancia 037 Group B rally car, famously the last RWD car to win the World Rally Championship in 1983. They are both brilliant, the former storming to a famous TG Performance Car of the Year victory in Portugal last summer... but this is something very different, a completely new from the ground up hypercar with a carbon fibre monocoque, V8 engine, manual gearbox and rear-wheel drive. The birth of a new hypercar force.

The mood board is still old school, hairy chested motorsport, but focus shifts away from rallying to more hardcore road and track performance, with inspiration from the world of endurance racing back in the 1980s. Specifically, the 1981 Lancia Beta Montecarlo Turbo Group 5, which was the technical predecessor and engineering foundation for the Lancia 037 Group B rally car (and a car raced by the founder, CEO and ex-WRC driver Luca Betti at the Le Mans Classic). Although the choice of a V8 engine is more of a nod to the 1983 Lancia LC2, Lancia’s answer to the dominant Porsche 956.