Oof: Kimera previews 'hyper retromod' K39

Kimera Automobili wants to return to motorsport on a Sunday next June. After selling cars on Monday

You’ll be familiar with the work of Kimera Automobili by now - partly because we’ve been drooling over its homage to the Lancia Stratos since 2021, and partly because any PHer with a million (and a bit) quid in their skyrocket can click here and buy one right now. So far, the firm has concentrated on building road cars - it reckons that half of the sold-out 37 EVO37 cars are already on the road, and half the all-wheel-drive EVO38 version (launched last year) are assigned to customers.

With that all underway, and the dust just settled on this year’s Pikes Peak result, Kimera has announced its plans to return to its own recent past - namely, motorsport - with the all-new K39, a car it intends to run at next year’s Race to the Clouds. The look of the new model is loosely based on the Lancia Beta Montecarlo Turbo Group 5 monster which competed in the World Sportscar Championship back in the ‘80s - but, unlike the restomod EVO37 and EVO38, the K-designated car is ‘not an evolution of an existing donor car, but a Kimera in its own right’.

This is both unsurprising (because breaking records at Pikes Peak requires something custom-built) and very welcome, because not only does the K39 look astonishingly good, it is also promised to feature a ‘sophisticated and extremely light monocoque chassis in carbon fibre with a load-bearing engine and the latest generation mechanics’, including pushrod suspension and the possibility of a KERS-type system, which it reckons should being the power-to-weight ratio to 1:1.

If that thought wasn’t stimulating enough, it has also dangled the prospect of a twin-turbo V8 as the engine in question, with ‘an architecture similar to the one of the legendary LC2, the pinnacle of Team Martini Racing's Sport Prototype cars’ referring to the 2.6-litre Quattrovalvole race unit that Ferrari developed from its 308 GTBi engine. Later bored out, the V8 would go on to develop as much as 828hp - exactly the kind of monster output that Kimera will need to exceed if it plans on competing with anything battery-powered in Colorado.

The firm says it will confirm the technical package in a couple of months. By which time we expect it will have also decided exactly what a ‘customer version’ looks like. Yep, that’s right - while the K39 was conceived purely as a hill climb machine, ’the interest and demand of Kimera's existing customers for this project led to the immediate assumption that a small series could be built.’ This is probably what you get for letting buyers wander around the factory, looking at scale models. Or reading the Internet.

As you might expect, Kimera sees this as an opportunity to involve its most enthusiastic patrons in the ‘creation and construction phase’ of the K39, which would even include testing the competition model to see which of its attributes ought to make it to the production car. A potential recipe for development-based disaster, too, of course - but increasingly what buyers expect from a seven-figure purchase, and one that Kimera reckons it is well placed to cater for as a young company that ‘still allows those who approach the brand to truly access an almost lost world of passion and expertise’. Its longer-in-the-tooth rivals would vociferously argue that point - but Kimera’s assertion that it is building cars with ‘a character unmatched in style, performance and driving pleasure’ is increasingly hard to dispute from where we're sitting.