Despite appearances, designing a car is an extremely challenging proposition. Companies like Ford, Honda, and the behemoth that is the VW Group quite literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in their design departments alone. Taking that to the next level, since they are a much lower volume product, supercars are even more difficult to design and produce. In fact, some of the greatest supercars and hypercars that have made it to the road are, despite prices ranging from the hundreds of thousands to several million dollars, selling at a loss.
Sometimes, however, reading the market and the signs about their cars have led some manufacturers to abandon a project simply because it wouldn’t sell or could be a fiscal disaster for the company in some other way. These cars are often shuffled into the vault, at whatever stage they are at, and locked away, out sight, out of mind.
There are some, however, that read the market right but wouldn’t be able to be sold as a profit, and which influenced later cars that did succeed. Today, we are going to look at three supercars that were shelved during design but started the ideas rolling for supercars that were later made.
In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company, after being rebuffed by Enzo Ferrari when they were trying to buy the company, produced one of the best supercars that the world had seen up until that point: the original Ford GT40. It was both a gigantic middle finger to Ferrari and an exercise in what happens when you put the right people in charge of the right departments to make an unbelievably fast and gorgeous car.
The blinds were pulled back in on October 24, 2017, with the unveiling of the Apollo Intensa Emozione, a hypercar meant to evoke feelings of speed and intensity even when standing still. Breaking from Audi history, the car is instead powered by a Ferrari 6.3L F140FE V12 pushing out 780 HP.
If that engine code sounds a touch familiar, it’s the same engine that is the internal combustion engine part of the Ferrari LaFerrari hypercar—except in the Intensa Emozione, they have turned the wick up a little, took out some of the exhaust baffles, and let it loose to make its signature incredible howl.
Only 10 Apollo Intensa Emoziones are to be made, and they are all sold. Half haven’t been built yet because of the global pandemic, but production has restarted, and Apollo is teasing that another car is in the works already!
Image Source: Glebiy / Shutterstock
