RIDE THE LIGHTNING

What's the quickest car in the world like on a normal road? Can you ever use 2,000bhp – and what does it feel like? Ollie Kew has a date with a, erm, grandmother...

- WORDS OLLIE KEW

Poor Baka. She’s a mess. Her naked carbon fibre panels are yellowed and dulled from testing different lacquer finishes. Jagged chunks are missing from her butterfly doors. Everywhere the light touches exposes scratches, gouges and gaffer tape residue. This isn’t your usual Fabergé egg exposed weave hypercar, all pouty, peacocking and safely wrapped in paint protection armour, its reason for existing merely to preserve a single digit mileage for the next collector.

Baka’s interior is a bomb site. Her vivid blue steering wheel is stained brown from 38,000 miles of hard graft through 50°C deserts, subzero Arctic convoys, ten tenths racetrack torture and several deliberate crashes. The matted armrest is a petri dish of test driver mung and there’s a hole in the passenger seat that looks suspiciously like a cigarette burn. Apparently one of the engineers dropped his red hot soldering iron.

Baka is not her official name. It’s what I've christened this long suffering Rimac test bed. In a world exclusive for TG, we present the Nevera R.

It’s the lighter, grippier, angrier and even more powerful version of what was already the fastest accelerating car in the world. Only, this one didn’t start life as an R. It was originally a normal Nevera, if you could ever deem a car with 1,888bhp and capable of 0-62mph in 1.8 seconds ‘normal’. Once the factory learned everything it could from its original form, it mutated into an R.

Those of you who really know your supercars will remember this isn’t a unique strategy for an ultra boutique unicorn stable. Pagani shapeshifted a Trigger’s broom Zonda, which spent 18 years shaking down tuned up V12s, magnesium suspension, stronger brakes and unobtanium exhausts in increasingly tatty bodywork. Somewhere along her one million kilometre career, Pagani’s engineers nicknamed their patchwork supercar ‘La Nonna’ before treating her to a concours restoration to celebrate Horacio P’s 60th birthday.