STEALTH FIGHTER FOR THE ROAD

Following a stellar career creating legends for Audi, Roland Gumpert set out to build a radical track-day weapon. Marc Sonnery takes a brave pill

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Some years ago, on my annual visit to the sorely missed Geneva motor show, the Gumpert Apollo really caught my eye. Supercars rarely do that. Here was a no-nonsense instrument so focused on efficiency that it appeared almost austere, and made most of its rivals seem dainty and effete. It looked like a bulldog among Afghan hounds.

I spoke with one of the Gumpert representatives on the stand, a bright young Czech racer called Gabriela Jílková. She seemed deeply impressed, rather than merely pushing a product. That piqued my interest even more. And then, in August 2009, the Apollo set a new Nürburgring Nordchsleife lap record, beating all comers at 7min 11.57sec. But how did Gumpert Sportwagenmanufaktur GmbH come to be?

Roland Gumpert’s creation has an unusual back-story, as befits a true maverick. An illustration: in his teens he secretly took the motor from his mother’s vacuum cleaner to try to turn it into a turbocharger… Yet he veered away from the mad professor path to become an engineer, hired by Audi in 1969 for testing duties and working his way up to collaborate with none other than Ferdinand Piëch.

He developed the four-wheel-drive Iltis military all-terrain vehicle (see Octane 202), a vehicle in which Freddy Kottulinsky won the gruelling 1980 Paris-Dakar Raid, while Gumpert himself finished ninth in his. He soon rose to head of Audi Sport and led the company through its triumphant Quattro WRC era, with four world titles and 24 individual victories. Supremacy achieved.

This encouraged him to seek other challenges. The Apollo was intended to win on the track and then be used on the road – 30 years after many thought that concept had died. Yet he was quite specific about what he wanted: ‘It has always been my dream to have a car with so much downforce, such aerodynamic efficiency that you could drive on the roof of a tunnel at high speed. This car can do it.’