Rodin reveals £1.8m FZero hypercar

From a small corner of the South Island of New Zealand, Rodin Cars has announced full details of the FZero.

It’s a new rival to the Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro and Red Bull’s forthcoming RB17, to form an unholy trinity of road-illegal track cars aiming to provide performance as close to that of a modern Formula 1 car as is possible without going through the tedious business of qualifying for a Super Licence.

Actually, in the case of the FZero, Rodin founder David Dicker insists it might even be faster than an F1 car. ‘We’re lighter than an F1 car, we have more power and our aero is designed without a rulebook,’ he told me from Rodin’s UK base at Donington Park. It is this, he says, plus the (comparatively) cheap £1.8 million price that will allow it to compete with its rivals from far more familiar brands.

The Rodin FZero is so named because in one sense it’s one better than ‘F1’. And you can see why: with 1176bhp from a bespoke 4-litre, twin-turbo, hybridised V10 in a package weighing just 698kg – and that’s with oil, water and fuel on board, not the ‘dry’ weight usually quoted for such cars – it’s going to have a power-to-weight ratio approaching 1700bhp/tonne, comfortably more than double that of the 300mph Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+.

The FZero has a carbon, single-seat tub. The engine develops 986bhp at 10,000rpm, the remaining power coming from its hybrid. It was developed in the UK by Neil Brown Engineering to a Rodin specification. The eight-speed gearbox is built by Ricardo and comes with a titanium case printed in 3D by Rodin in New Zealand. The brakes are carbon-carbon like F1 cars, not carbon ceramic. The body develops up to four tonnes of downforce.

Just 27 FZeros will be built. The prototype will run this year, with deliveries starting next summer. Once the project is underway, Dicker will look at adapting the design and creating something that can be used on the road. Will he succeed without a name like Aston Martin or Red Bull and without the credibility of Adrian Newey as designer? The FZero will be far cheaper and rarer than either rival. If it is faster too, I’d say it just might.