I’d like to begin by saying thank you to the team at Kraft Haus Technic for such a nice day. You managed to make the usual corporate event feel of car reveals far more bearable, plus the food was great. Anyway…
KHT know how to make fast cars. They are the yard stick, and that’s an end of it. The Eau Rouge is no different; a smooth, sculpted jet fighter of a mid-engine hypercar. An 825hp, ultra advanced performance machine.
The front looks like something out of the new Blade Runner film. The rear is wide, but cool. The whole body conveys motion. There’s no emotion, anywhere; it’s as against beautiful as you’d expect any German car to be. It’s pretty vulgar in parts, but it oozes performance. Functionality over style.
KHT took us out to the Nurburgring for a pre-production drive, a location that couldn’t be any more suitable.
Sadly it won’t have enough room to get up to this cars top speed of 247 mph, but it’s certainly enough to feel the impact of the 2.4 second 0-60 time. It’s surprisingly unbrutal, but you can hardly miss it. Back to that jet-fighter analogy, it’s very much like putting the afterburner on every time you even merely stroke the throttle pedal.
I am not accustomed to the Nurburgring, and my passenger-cum-instructor from KHT is a welcome bit of help. Thankfully once I’d got the hang of things, I could get a brief glimpse at what the Eau Rouge is capable of.
It feels like a race car, even on this ‘road’ trim. And an American one at that. The 7L V8 isn’t ultra responsive, rather the power builds and swells, but there’s so much of it to deliver that any input makes a big difference. The brakes are sledgehammers, and good ones at that. You will stop. The suspension is phenomenal; absolutely no body roll and yet it still manages to be somewhat comfortable. Thank the active suspension for that, otherwise it would be unbearable anywhere else.
One word does come to mind though; frantic. The whole car feels like a rat with rabies, only contained and controlled. Give it an inch and it’ll send you right into the nearest tree, and even when I was hardly pushing it beyond 50% of its capability, it was more than ready to kill you. You’ll definitely need to keep the driver aids on at all times until you’re life insurance is sorted and you’re sure you have nothing left to loose.
This is how you do a hypercar. It’s a mathematical example, and a near perfect one at that. Just one problem; it has no heart. It is an out-and-out machine. There is no soul here, though I feel it might be somewhere behind all the carbon fibre and electronic gizmos.
It’s not beautiful, it’s very calculated, it is purely function over form. But you won’t love it; you’ll love what it represents, the result of hundreds of thousands of hours of R&D, the result of years of testing in the world of motorsport and many, many millions of dollars of funding. That is worthy of the utter most expect.
But as a car, it’s not something you’re going to feel a connection with. It’s incredibly good as a machine, and nothing more. The passion is in the performance, and it’s been thoroughly camoflauged.
The Eau Rouge, then, is the A-10 Warthog of the Hypercar roster. It’s not beautiful and it’s hardly soulful, but that thing is still in regular service 40 years after its introduction, and there’s a reason for that. Something tells me the Eau Rouge will have a similar status 40 years from now.
- Gavin Anderson
Photo by @squidhead because none of the pictures I took could do this justice and his photoshop work is fantastic. Read the full article here, the story behind this car is fantastic.