Zero Hour

Rodin Cars founder David Dicker is no stranger to success, so when he says he’s going to build a road‑legal hypercar that will be quicker than an F1 car, you tend to believe him. This is how he plans to do it.

- Steve Sutcliffe

DAVID DICKER IS NOT THE KIND of bloke you’d expect to find at the centre of a new hypercar company. He dresses casually to the point of mild bemusement when we meet in a suite he’s taken at the Shard to discuss his latest venture. He wears a plain white cotton shirt and ordinary-looking slacks. His shoes are neither flash nor expensive, and there’s not so much as a hint of designer watch on his wrist.

He also wears his long white hair in a ponytail and looks at you through a pair of regulation specs. At first glance you could even take him for one of the many ex-members of Fleetwood Mac. But not necessarily someone who’s made millions out of selling computers in Australia and New Zealand, and who is now reinvesting a sizeable chunk of that wealth into building a road-legal car that ‘will be quicker than a Formula 1 car’.

As such, he’s highly engaging to talk with because, despite this extraordinary claim, there is little or no BS about 66-yearold Dicker. He says it how he thinks, and if you’re remotely interested in cars and the engineering behind them, you listen– quite often with an initial sense of bewilderment in the confidence he displays about his company’s ability to get this particular job done.

So who is Dicker, and where does his confidence to take on the world’s best supercar makers come from at such a relatively late stage in life?