So far in this series a prevailing theme has emerged – that these didn’t make it track-only hypercar/track only supercars didn’t fail for lack of trying.
Each car has been the product of soulful engineering expertise; each given buoyancy with both hope and ambition equally. Most of the cars on this list have sought to push the envelope of what a car can do far further than the big OEMs of the time, and it is this phenomenon that makes their eventual failures even more upsetting.
In this entry into the series, we are looking at the Gumpert Apollo.
Now, we’d like to think that the Apollo has a bit more rep than the other cars on this list, simply because it is the kind of car that you only have to lay eyes on once after which it is permanently burned into your brain. The Apollo is ugly.
But to judge a car purely on aesthetics would be a bit vapid. So we’ll park the looks and dig a little bit into the enigmatic Apollo’s background. The Gumpert Apollo is the brainchild of Roland Gumpert, the man who was tasked by Audi to deliver World Rally Championships trophies to Ingolstadt in the 1980s. As the head of Audi Sport, Gumpert oversaw one of rallying’s golden ages, at a time where the envelope wasn’t being bushed, but rather violently shoved.
This I suppose, engaging maximum glibness, places Gumpert in the same league as Adrian Newey, whose F1 credentials are being bandied about by Aston Martin with every spare breath.
So Gumpert is a proper motorsport dude and his subsequent creation is a proper motorsport dude’s kind of car. It is achingly purposeful. It is the kind of car built to be fast and its whole design is geared towards this goal.
The Apollo is powered by a twin-turbocharged version of the 4.2L V8 used originally in the B7 generation Audi RS4, and later in the very first Audi R8. Now, the engine is interesting as Gumpert was still a big player at Audi Sport at the time. In fact, the Audi big wigs O.K’d Gumpert’s involvement in the Apollo project, which gives it this sort of Audi but not Audi kind of vibe. The engine is a result of a nice bit of friendliness between the two but crucially it also gives the Apollo a rocksteady mechanical base.
Couple this engine, that could deliver up to 790 bhp in its most extreme state of tune, to a seven-speed sequential gearbox and the Apollo’s mission for speed seems a sure fire success. Consider that the Apollo’s kerb weight lay somewhere between 1100 and 1200 kgs and the performance speaks for itself.
And then there was the body. Yes it is ghoulishly, devilishly ugly, but admirably a complete slave to physics. The Apollo looks the way it does, not for style’s sake or for vanity or for Instagram but instead for pure aerodynamic function.
It looks unlike just about anything else.
But like we mentioned earlier, the car is not wilfully ugly. Its looks give it supernatural aerodynamic capabilities. The Apollo’s unconventional body creates enough downforce to theoretically allow the Apollo to drive on the ceiling of a tunnel at 190-ish mph, which is nearly 40 mph short of its top speed. This is an aerodynamic factoid that is usually deployed in relation to Formula 1 cars, but a road car being able to make the same claim, and some way short of its maximum velocity (given, 190 mph is still very fast), is unheard of.
All of this combined to make the Apollo an unbelievably capable machine. On a circuit today, it would probably hoover up just about anything.
Unfortunately the world can be unkind, and in 2013 Gumpert, as a manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy. The Gumpert Apollo was just too much. Too niche, too expensive and its looks did it no favours. Mechanically it was near unbeatable, and its engineering spec was to die for. Along with numerous Koenigseggs, it was a hypercar before hypercars were really a thing.
The Apollo name lives on, in name and spirit, as Apollo Automotive, from which some fairly stunning machines have emerged, but none have come close to the unforgettable brutality of the original Apollo.
Kerbside 