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The Apollo Arrow hypercar is Gumpert's glorious resurrection

If a shark could move at 220 mph, it would look something like this

Gumpert might not have been a company many people heard of, and its exotic cars were even rarer to see in person, but it offers a proud heritage of road-going race cars that the new Apollo is now building on. Revived from bankruptcy and rebranded to Apollo in 2015, the new company is staking its future on the Arrow hypercar that's been unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show this week. The Arrow is extreme both in performance and looks — as every hypercar must be — though it goes further than most with the number of fins, flares, and scoops in its exterior design. The wheel arches are more exaggerated than usual and the front comes to a sharp point, giving this car a profile that lives up to its name.

I talked with the two designers of the Apollo Arrow here in Geneva — yes, there are only two, both of them in their 20s — and they insisted that the final car in 2017 will look just as wild and aggressive as the prototype model on show today. There won't be any taming of this beast's design. Almost the whole car is ready for homologation already, except for some parts behind the front wheels and the massive rear wing. The Arrow's look was inspired by the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, sharks, and basically anything else that kills for a living.

Beating at the heart of this supercar is a 4-liter twin-turbo V8 engine from Audi, customized to eke out ungodly amounts of power. It takes the Arrow from 0 to 62 mph in 2.9 seconds and up to a maximum of 224 mph (360 km/h). One cool thing to note about the Arrow's engineering development is that the new company is still headed up by Roland Gumpert, which lends some credibility to the promise of "achieving the unimaginable" (though I get the sense that Bugatti and Lamborghini customers have imagined everything by now). In any case, with up to 1,000hp and a maximum 1,000Nm of torque, the Arrow should have enough to stand among the finest and fastest hypercars.

Apollo's Arrow distinguishes itself from others in its class with its aerodynamics, geometry, and weight. If it hits its target weight of under 1,300 kg for the final production vehicle, the company will have one of the lightest super sports cars on the market. And it will be one of the more affordable ones, costing less than €1 million. Practicality is usually a low priority for exotic automobiles, but the Arrow will include powered windows, electronic stability control, ABS, and a satellite navigation system as standard. The only thing missing is the high-net-worth pilot to steer it around.

Apollo Arrow gallery

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