There's no two ways around it. The Gumpert Apollo Speed is hideously ugly. But the fact it does zero to 62 in 3 seconds flat, tops out at 225 and handles like a Formula 1 car makes it sexy as hell.
That's the beauty of German boutique automaker Gumpert Sportwagenmanufaktur - everything about its cars is designed solely for the purpose of achieving heart-stopping velocity and eye-compressing downforce, aesthetics be damned.
So while the Apollo Speed that made its debut at the Geneva Motor Show looks, as our friends at Autoblog so rightly noted, like a "raging Smurf," we would sell a kidney for the chance to blow the doors off one.
As crazy as the aesthetics of the Apollo Speed are, cars all look pretty much the same from the driver's seat. The only thing that matters with a car like this is what happens when you drop the clutch and hit the gas. So what if the Apollo Speed looks like a Predator helmet? The bottom line is this car can fly.
Gumpert promises the Speed will do zero to 62 in 3.0 seconds and zero to 124 in 8.9 on its way to a top speed of 225 mph. Rapid propulsion comes via a 4.2-liter Audi engine fitted with twin turbochargers. Gumpert offers the car in three levels of tune; go for the full kit and you're looking at 800 horsepower and enough torque to stop the rotation of the earth.
Why Audi engines? Because Roland Gumpert cut his teeth as a development engineer at Audi and director of Audi Sport in the 1970s and 80s. The automaker won 25 World Rally Championship races and two WRC driver's and constructor's titles under his leadership, so he is quite adept at making Audi engines scream.
As for the handling, Gumpert claims the Apollo, like an F1 car, produces enough downforce to keep it glued to the roof of a tunnel if you're going fast enough. There's no way of testing that, of course, but Top Gear's top driver flogged an Apollo around the Power Lap in 1:17.1, shaving two-tenths of a second off the Ascara A10 to post the show's best lap time ever.
Beauty is only carbon fiber deep. It's what's under the hood that really counts, and that makes the Apollo speed absolutely beautiful.
Photo via our friends at autoblog.nl, which has a full gallery of the Apollo Speed that you definitely ought to check out because you need to see the Apollo Speed from the back to appreciate how, um, aesthetically challenged it is.
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