Czinger 21C: Driving the world’s most innovative hypercar – car pictures of the week
Czinger is one of those firms that’s pushing boundaries and innovating in ways bigger companies simply can’t. The 21C hypercar is its tech shop window
Some hypercars and supercars you look at immediately make you think ‘beautiful’. With many others, it’s the word ostentatious that springs to mind. What about the Czinger 21C, a wildly innovative, mould-breaking hypercar coming all the way from California? My first thought: ‘weird’. It is an entirely alien-looking thing, save for the rubber-wrapped circular things at each corner that it appears to sit on.
There are two versions: the ‘VMax’, designed for 250mph-plus speeds, and the standard high-downforce version, designed for track work. To try and get our heads around these otherworldly creations, we drove both back-to-back on some of the best Californian roads we could find. These are our favourite shots.
Its baffling shape comes courtesy of its unique seating arrangement – two seats, one in front of the other in a central position. That allows a slimmed-down glasshouse and a much slipperier shape. The rest of the car’s shape is dictated by aerodynamics and cooling for the bespoke 2.9-litre twin-turbo V8 and hybrid system. While the looks grab your attention at first, it’s Czinger’s innovation in manufacturing that really drops your jaw.
It uses proprietary metal 3D-printing tech to create complex shapes that would be impossible to manufacture with traditional methods. They even allow the weaving of complex structures within the parts. That means its suspension componentry doesn’t feature a single wasted gram of material, with the load paths deciding precisely where the material is needed, and therefore where it goes. The results look less like wishbones, cross braces or engine cradles and more like Kryptonian set dressing from a Superman movie. Needless to say, with that driving position, 1250bhp on tap, 11,000rpm to play with and less than 1800kg to shift, it’s a driving experience like few others. Here’s an excerpt from the feature in evo issue 351, available from the evo Shop:
‘With the engine fizzing and primed at 6000rpm I gun it, and the 21C blows my socks off. The hit is instantaneous and borderline violent, the serrated sound of the V8 intensifying as it rapidly increases in pitch, the wheel pulling at my hands as electric power is dumped to the front wheels. At 9000rpm it sounds like I should be pulling for the next gear. At 10k there’s the intense wail of a superbike, then as the 11k cut-off approaches you can barely think fast enough to pull for the next gear, so furious is the delivery.’ – Yousuf Ashraf, evo senior staff writer
