You’ll be familiar with the work of Kimera Automobili by now - partly because we’ve been drooling over its homage to the Lancia Stratos since 2021, and partly because any PHer with a million quid in their skyrocketand buy one right now. So far, the firm has concentrated on building road cars - it reckons that half of the sold-out 37 EVO37 cars are already on the road, and half the all-wheel-drive EVO38 version are assigned to customers.
This is both unsurprising and very welcome, because not only does the K39 look astonishingly good, it is also promised to feature a ‘sophisticated and extremely light monocoque chassis in carbon fibre with a load-bearing engine and the latest generation mechanics’, including pushrod suspension and the possibility of a KERS-type system, which it reckons should being the power-to-weight ratio to 1:1.
If that thought wasn’t stimulating enough, it has also dangled the prospect of a twin-turbo V8 as the engine in question, with ‘an architecture similar to the one of the legendary LC2, the pinnacle of Team Martini Racing's Sport Prototype cars’ referring to the 2.6-litre Quattrovalvole race unit that Ferrari developed from its 308 GTBi engine.
The firm says it will confirm the technical package in a couple of months. By which time we expect it will have also decided exactly what a ‘customer version’ looks like. Yep, that’s right - while the K39 was conceived purely as a hill climb machine, ’the interest and demand of Kimera's existing customers for this project led to the immediate assumption that a small series could be built.’ This is probably what you get for letting buyers wander around the factory, looking at scale models.
As you might expect, Kimera sees this as an opportunity to involve its most enthusiastic patrons in the ‘creation and construction phase’ of the K39, which would even include testing the competition model to see which of its attributes ought to make it to the production car.