Gumpert Apollo S (2008) CAR review

Everything you need to know about the Gumpert Apollo is there from the outset, worn on the sleeve and clearly visible the first time you look at it. Or should that be ‘stare’ at it. Compact, brutish, uncompromising, and fearsomely fast, the Gumpert Apollo looks like an old Group C racer for the road, and it’s probably as quick as one too. But maybe a bit uglier.

So why the silly Gumpert Apollo name?

Roland Gumpert is the engineer who ran Audi motorsport back in the 1980s, when the Quattro was winning all those World Rally Championships. When he retired, he needed a little hobby to keep himself occupied, so he decided to create his own car company, built around a single, extreme product – the Apollo supercar. He used his Audi contacts to good effect – signing up his old mates for everything from the twin turbo 4.2-litre V8, derived from the old RS6 engine, to the Audi windtunnel, where Roland bagged some time for the Apollo’s functional aerodynamics.

It’s German through-and-through then?

Yes, there is something very functional and teutonic about this no-frills supercar, compared to the flair and style of the Italians. It looks like a lump hammer and it’s as crushingly effective as one too.

But with that German frankness also comes a kind of honest purity, and a depth of engineering that puts the Gumpert into a different bracket to most tiny manufacturers with supercar aspirations. Look at the tubular chassis with its carbon safety cell, the pushrod suspension or the bespoke six-speed sequential shift – everything reeks of nerdy attention to detail. In fact, it’s when Gumpert tries to do ‘style’ that it all goes wrong – like the criminally naff griffin emblem, stitched into the seat-backs. Let’s stick to the high-strength chrome-molybdenum steel and double transverse control arm pushrod configuration, eh boys?

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