2009
Tramonta R
Spain


Sit in this thing and it's like being in an F1 car - or a modern fighter jet. You sit in the centre of the cockpit with the passenger seat behind you. It's a tight fit but the pedals and driving position have been factory built to the buyer's dimensions. Press that 'go' pedal and you'll start finding out what he Tramonta is all about.

Five and a half litres pumping out up to 720hp in a car that weighs about the same as a bag of sugar. That's a recipe for rapid movement. So the 0-60 time is just 3.6 seconds and top is around 200mph or 320kph. That'll do nicely...

Named after a wind that sweeps across Spain, the country’s first supercar was designed by Josep Rubau, an automotive designer from the Royal College of Art in London.

Josep turned down a job designing machines for the Star Wars movies in Hollywood to concentrate on automotive design. At first he worked for Volkswagen in Germany but left to create a space age vehicle of his own.

Incredibly, his futuristic-looking car somehow made it into production. A dozen of his idiosyncratic rear-wheel drive machines are built each year at a small factory on the Costa Brava in Spain.

There’s absolutely nothing normal about the ‘R’. Driver and passenger sit in line under an aircraft-style canopy (the passenger slightly higher than driver), the bonnet badge is made of solid white gold, and the entire carbon fibre body is fine tuned to the physical dimensions of the buyer. Even the door handles and pedals are adjusted to the driver’s dimensions. And instead of a chassis number, each R will be inscribed with a line of specially-composed poetry.

Stupendous power comes from a twin-turbo Mercedes V12. If 550bhp is not enough, you can press a button to boost output to 720bhp, although, rather unbelievably, buyers are told not to do this in countries that restrict emissions levels. Yeh, we promise not to...

All that power sits in a car that weighs about as much as a bottle of sangria, thanks not only to the featherlight carbon fibre body but an innovative carbon fibre chassis. Even the wheels are engineered for weight – they are made of a mix of carbon and magnesium. 

So buckle up tight for a ride of stupendous acceleration and track-car handling... and a trail of people pointing with their mouths wide open.