The Nilu in all its glory. Nilu27 View 33 Images –
The frontman behind the Nilu is Russia’s Sasha Selipanov, an automotive visionary with some staggering exterior designs in his portfolio, including the Koenigsegg Gemera, Lamborghini Huracán and Bugatti Chiron.
But as pretty as the Nilu might be, this car may best be defied by what’s missing. Selipanov says no to electric motors, to hybrid engines, to batteries and to traction control. No to active wings and suspension. No to stability control, navigation, driving modes, and even no to such feeble luxuries as an AM/FM radio.
Instead, he says yes to carbon fiber monocoques, to aluminum subframes, to big analog gauges. Yes to shift gates and to steering wheels without any knobs on them. Yes to the days when reaching up to adjust your side view mirror to see or reaching across to the passenger side to hand crank the window was the only way.
Yes, then, to the raw feel of driving a barely-controllable hypercar as fast as humanly possible – this machine is a viscerally stripped-back appeal to the desires of our lizard brains. Selipanov has designed the most bare-bones work of high-functioning automotive art we’ve seen in a long time.
The exhaust, too, looks to be a sculpted work of art rather than merely a “hot-V” port to excise the combustion demons from the fiery belly of that 1,000-horsepower, 6.5L, big-bore, short-stroke, fire-breathing, naturally aspirated 80-degree V12, which was developed exclusively for the Nilu by Hartley Engines.
We’d reckon that’ll be adequate to get the 2,645 lb (1,200 kg) chassis up and moving to its restricted top speed of 248 mph (400 kph).
Interestingly, the entire exhaust system is 3D-printed in Inconel, a nickel-chromium-based superalloy. On the head, the intake and exhaust have been swapped, allowing Hartley to create the 12-into-1 “snakepit” exhaust headers.
In the Hartley Engines design brief for the powerplant to be bolted into the Nilu, the focus was “be cool as f—“, according to Nelson Hartley, founder and CEO. In a world where the exquisite performance engineering of most hypercar engines is wasted ferrying owners from yacht to casino in heavy traffic, “be cool as f—” might be about the most practical design brief you could give.
One thing that is very much not cool as f— is hypercar launch videos in which the sound has been overlaid, but sadly that’s what the Nilu gets. That’s a pity, since the sound promises to be absolutely epic.
Redlining north of 11,000 rpm, it very much sounds like a Formula 1 car in the video – two Formula 1 cars, in fact. If it sounds like that in the flesh, well, we imagine it’ll call forth equal measures of joy, admiration, disdain and disgust, depending on which neighborhood it’s being driven through, and at what hour.
Either way, it’s likely to be the highest-revving street car ever produced that doesn’t have Gordon Murray‘s name on it, and will surely be responsible for just as many squirts of adrenaline and cortisol outside the cabin as within it. Listen:
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On to practicalities. At each corner of the Nilu are Italian AppTech center lock wheels. 20″ up front, 21″ on the rear, all shod with sticky Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires. Behind those wheels are big 6-pot Brembo carbon-ceramic slow-downers.
Moving further up will land you at the Nilu’s double wishbone, pushrod suspension. Very similar to Formula 1.
This big-horsepower rear-wheel-drive with a 7-speed manual gearbox has all the vibes of an old school muscle car – with a modern rear engine twist. And speaking of twist, the Nilu does have one concession to technology on board: a small screen in the cockpit that functions as a rear-view camera, since you can’t see through the rear-mounted engine.
It looks like the kind of car 8-year-old me would have mishmashed out on paper with all the best cues from all my favorite cars and bikes: the Ferrari F40, the McLaren F1, the GT40, Speed Racer’s Mach 5, Colin McRae’s Subaru STi 22B, the Corvette Stingray (circa 1975, of course), the Ducati 916 SPS… It’s a design worthy of being hung proudly on the fridge.
Nilu27 will only produce 54 cars in all (27 is half of 54… I wonder what the significance is?) out of Irvine, CA. The car will make its public debut on August 15th on the ramp at Pebble Beach in Monterey, CA. Don’t miss the image gallery on this one, folks, these are some of the best hypercar photos we’ve seen in a long time.
Rock on!
Source: Nilu27 View gallery – 33 images
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