Retro review: the Gumpert Apollo

This review was first published in Issue 144 of Top Gear magazine (2005)

Straight out of the gate and I’ve stalled the Apollo because it has a clutch that’s as progressive as someone snatching their hand from a Bunsen burner. I fumble for the start button among the shotgun-blast of toggle switches on the dash, before firing the Audi 4.2 V8 back up and piling on the revs to pull away. With all the bare carbon and utility-biased functionality, I’m thinking Group C racer crossed with Le Mans prototype – and the full FIA crash structure that caused me to scrape both hips on the way in is not dissuading me from that notion. We make it to second before the traffic lights, one short and firm pull on the sequential ’box. The clutch, it turns out, isn’t so bad on the move.

Actually, no. Stalled it. Again. I now have to three-point turn at a normal road junction because the Apollo has the elbow-to-elbow lock of an arthritic ex-tennis pro, and at every change of direction I stall at least once. Reverse is push lever to position ‘A’ and depress button ‘C’ while dealing with psycho clutch and trying to remember which way to push the gearlever. It’s not easy. The traffic is building up, the car is heating up and I’m close to getting up and leaving. The front spoiler is much longer than the nose of the car and about two fingers off the deck, and I really, really don’t want to beach this £190k supercar on the kerb outside the showroom.

Eventually, we get it straight and I just dial in a few revs. Wheelspin ensues. Lots and lots of wheelspin. As we change up to third and the rear wheels break traction yet again, I go all tight inside. My abdomen crunches. I pray my passenger can’t see me gurning with the effort of balancing 650bhp on the see-saw of 1,150kg and rear tyres the width of industrial lawn rollers. It’s not pretty, but we’re still going in the same direction – and nobody is screaming. Not yet.

Everything’s gone ‘whooshy’. I swear there’s a place where your vision goes black-and-white in order to create the resolution necessary to stop you becoming a carbon-fibre mosaic on the nearest tree, and it’s fair to say that the extra gumption feels beefy. It’s provided by a pair of turbos the size of footballs, and the thrust surfs the Apollo along the scarred dual carriageway outside Stoke Poges like a supersonic tidal bore.

“This engine we have had running all day at 800bhp,” barks the Belgian Gumpert test driver, Francois, above the tumble- dryer that is the Gumpert. “It just got a bit hot with the – how you say? – the water in the cooling. But we can have 1,000bhp if we want.”

The bare and basic 650bhp is feeling like more than enough at the moment. Like I said, that 650bhp is spinning the rear wheels in third in the dry if you get medieval with the six-speed sequential, something that requires you not to lift for fear of unsettling the car. By ‘unsettle’ I mean ‘crash’. And it’s not one of those namby-pamby gearboxes, either. This one has a clutch (although one that you don’t use on full-throttle upchanges) and the harder you stab at the tall gearlever the better the change you get. Each jerk is punctuated by the chuff and twitter of wastegates that sound like I’ve just run over a family of songbirds with one of those industrial lawn rollers.

It should be a spine-shattering experience driving this car along a UK road, but the Gumpert feels bizarrely compliant. OK, so it could do with a bit more ride height and a bit less spoiler, but it grounds out less than it should and the speed is ridiculous. At one point on track we saw a speed that'd be so illegal I was convinced it was km/h. It wasn’t. And you can feel the aerodynamic package hoovering the car to the floor. In fact, I reckon this is one of the quickest cars I’ve ever driven, and that includes some track specials.

Indeed, the Gumpert is pitched as a racer that is uncompromised for the road. Well, I can attest to its abilities at making the world operate on a different definition of time, but there are some concerns. For a start, the car we were driving is a development mule. The doors and crash structure are in the wrong position for convenient entry and exit, the interior isn’t finished – except in bare carbon – and you won’t find much in the way of luxury around here. But these are concerns the Gumpert team feels it will have addressed by the time the first RHD customer cars break cover later on this year.

And it’s those things that will make or break the Gumpert. The engineering is there, the car is well set-up and the engine builder – MTM – knows its stuff, so it should be reliable. But it needs to make comfort changes to stop it being an oddity and to defeat the dangers of its daft name and looks. But, in the face of such outrageous performance, a £190k price tag starts to look like a weird kind of bargain.

Verdict: Possibly the fastest car on the road, but needs to make good on its promises for the production car. 

4.2-litre V8
650bhp, RWD
0-60mph in 3.0secs, max speed 223mph
1,150kg
Circa £190,000

Photography: Lee Brimble