More speed, less fun?

I knew the car I required as surely as I knew the road. The Praga Bohema is one of the new generation of road-legal hypercars. It may be the work of a relative unknown, but in performance terms it belongs in the company of the likes of the Aston Martin Valkyrie and Mercedes-AMG One. The so-called holy trinity – McLaren P1, LaFerrari, Porsche 918 Spyder – introduced new levels of technology, power and performance to the realm of the road car, but that was over a decade ago and things have moved on. And it’s been moved on by the Valkyrie, the One, a couple of others and, I’d argue, the Bohema.

So just how fast is this thing? Bone dry it weighs a shade under 1000kg. Its engine is borrowed from the Nissan GT-R – a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V6 tuned by Litchfield to deliver around 700bhp. Not a stunning output in this world of similarly powerful electric Kias and Hyundais, but in a sub-tonne car, it should be put to good use.

Besides, this isn’t really a power car, but an aero one. Praga says it produces ‘more than’ 900kg of downforce at 155mph – it’ll almost do that hypothetical trick of attaching itself to the ceiling of a tunnel. But the clearest demonstration of this car’s performance potential is this: a couple of months ago, in the hands of ex-Stig Ben Collins (look out for that name again on Ti soon…) the Bohema lapped the old Top Gear test track at Dunsfold in 1min 9.8sec. That’s just two tenths slower than the current Stig went in a Valkyrie a few weeks beforehand.

(I drove a Bohema prototype at Dunsfold a couple of years back too – probably not quite as fast as Collins. You can read the story here.)

Curiously – and I guess it’s because standing starts look better on telly – Dunsfold laps are not timed with a conventional flying start. The Praga guys reckon the more powerful, 1160bhp hybrid V12 Valkyrie races to a decisive advantage off the line, suggesting the Bohema is actually faster everywhere else. It may be less powerful, but it is lighter by almost 300kg (compared to the overweight AMG One, it’s more like 600kg).

So yes, the Praga ought to be fast enough for these purposes. And the setting? It had to be what everyone in my industry calls the Crickhowell road, in the eastern fringes of the Brecon Beacons, where I’ve been testing fast cars for almost 20 years. The sheep that graze these pastures will just need to be on their guard.

The Bohema is a fascinating car up close. Adrian Newey, who took a brief sabbatical from winning Formula 1 World Championships to design the Valkyrie, once spent an hour poring over the Praga with chief engineer Jan Martinek. Apparently he went away impressed, at least one or two ideas for his next customer car scribbled into his mental notebook.

The fundamentals you can see yourself – a carbon fibre tub, a narrow canopy over the slim cockpit, enormous venturi tunnels emerging from the rear, visible carbon double wishbone suspension with inboard spring and damper units, a prominent front splitter and more. There’s no active aero or active suspension because, reckons Martinek, that stuff just adds weight and complexity, and if the car is fundamentally right to begin with, it shouldn’t need it. The gearbox is a six-speed Hewland sequential and despite the belly-scraping appearance, Martinek says the Bohema has more ground clearance than the last Ford Focus RS.

There are beautifully executed design details all over the place, like the front number plate that unclips in seconds, so you can remove it once you arrive at the track to clear up the airflow under the car, and the telescopic engine cover support. But it’s inside the cosy cabin where you see how much consideration has gone into this car. The passenger, for instance, sits ever so slightly behind the driver, so their shoulders don’t rub. There’s also a rest for the passenger’s left elbow positioned just so that their arm won’t interfere with the driver’s right elbow. It means you sit in this necessarily compact cabin, passenger alongside, each feeling as though you have your own space. This is a fairly rough and ready prototype, but I’ve seen a production-intent example and the interior fittings are brilliantly done.

Up to around 50mph it’s possible to hold a conversation, but beyond that you’re shouting or, most likely, not bothering. But it isn’t so ear-rentingly loud you have to wear defenders. I wasn’t kidding when I said road driving was a minor priority for this car. Its public highway brief extends no further than ‘make it bearable’ – the point is this shouldn’t be a car you drive on the road for the fun of it, but just to get you to the race track where it really wants to play. It has helper springs that give it just enough ride comfort to make it tolerable – with speed the aero load compresses these to activate the stiffer main springs – but you do get knocked around in here. After five hours at the wheel, I was grateful to climb out and flop into a comfortable saloon car.

The Hewland was chosen because it’s lighter and smaller than a dual-clutch transmission. When you’re flying along it is sensational, each new gear slotting in instantaneously with a pop from the pneumatics, but in normal driving and manoeuvring it can be stroppy. The seating position is pure racing car – feet up like you’re in the bath, the oblong steering ‘wheel’ with its millimetre perfect sculpting offered towards your chest, harness clamping you in tight – and so is the view along the road ahead over the arches, so reminiscent of a warrior beetle’s exoskeleton.

I wish I’d been able to see it driving on the road amid everyday traffic. It must look like it’s landed from another world. It certainly put heads on swivels all day long. I’m sure even the dogs were staring.

I love the rattle and thunk as you fly over a cattle grid, and it’s louder in here than ever before, signalling the point as which you’ve escaped the hedgerows and the restricted visibility of the roads on the lower ground, and you’re finally upon the open hillside where you can see for miles, take a breath, and unleash.

But you don’t just let rip in a car like this. You choose one gear higher, then extend your right ankle in an exploratory jab of the throttle pedal. It’s funny – if horsepower has been devalued as a currency by the new breed of very powerful performance EVs, so has that initial rush of acceleration you feel the instant you crack open a throttle pedal. Combustion cars just don’t accelerate like EVs, at least not right away. So you aren’t assaulted by the Praga in that split second, but whereas the burst of acceleration fades very quickly in an EV, in a petrol car like this it just builds and builds.

The challenge, then, becomes finding the nerve to keep your foot buried as the rate at which you’re whacked down the road rises every second. I’m reminded of a McLaren powertrain – a brief delay after that initial throttle application, then a manic, headlong rush at the horizon as the torque gets hold of you, after which you’re riding a rocket. This GT-R motor doesn’t have the same wild top end as a Woking V8, but the elastic, frantic feel through the mid-range is just the same.

Not even those helper springs can smother the worst bumps around here, and the Bohema hits them hard. It tends to hunt out crowns and cambers in the surface too, all of which means you need to keep a good hold of this thing if it’s not to wriggle out of your grasp. On smoother stretches it’s altogether more civilised. The steering is light, ultra-quick and responsive, so you find you aren’t really feeding in steering lock to navigate corners like normal, but hinting at the yoke-like wheel that the road turns this many degrees that way, or so many the other. It feels like a racing kart in that regard. The brake pedal is rock solid and braking power immense, as are traction and cornering grip from the Michelin Cup 2 R semi-slicks on this warm, dry asphalt.

Piece it together and, as I suspected, there’s massively more performance than you can put to good use out here. But here’s the thing – not for a moment does this car feel like it’s a mile inside the limit of what it can do. Intellectually you know it must be, but the impression is anything but. You sit so low, just inches above the road, which exaggerates the sense of speed. Stones ping against the underside of the tub, the wind rushes over the canopy, the angry V6 and Hewland sequential fill the cabin with their own cacophonies, while you’re subject to enormous g-forces as you accelerate, steer through bends and hit the brakes.

And when the road is right and you’ve built your confidence, it arrives. The moment. Normally it only comes on a race track, but on one smoother section of tarmac, a stretch of hillside road that flowed left and right, I felt it. My focus narrowed, calm descended despite the maelstrom around me, and for a moment I was convinced the Praga and I were perfectly stationary and it was the road that was moving towards us, rushing underneath like a computer game.

It takes a certain kind of car to make that happen. My theory is that it only occurs in those that roll, pitch and dive almost not at all, and that have harnesses that hold you tight, meaning your body and limbs scarcely move independently of the car. You become one with it, bending the road as it charges at you with the wheel in your hands. And once you slow down, you have to blink a few times and shake your head a little to bring yourself back into the room. It’s a strange, almost transcendent headspace, one I’ve never been to on the road before.

Which isn’t to say I was driving at ludicrous speeds. I really wasn’t, certainly no faster than I’d have done whilst pressing on a bit in a more conventional supercar. But this machine is so raw, so loud, so connected and so intense you feel like you’re going faster than you really are. That’s what took me by surprise.

So what does it mean for my hypothesis? I still think I’m right, conceptually speaking. I really do believe that, by and large, cars with higher limits and greater performance potential are less involving on the road than more approachable ones. But I now know there are certain cars, and the Praga Bohema is one, that are so damn exciting no matter how you’re driving you can’t help but be thrilled by them. They are the exception that proves the rule.

Photography by Nathan Morgan