Light speed: unleashing the Rimac Nevera R, the fastest car in the world

Poor Baka. She’s a mess. Her naked carbon fibre panels are yellowed and dulled from testing different lacquer finishes. Jagged chunks are missing from her butterfly doors. Everywhere the light touches exposes scratches, gouges and gaffer tape residue. This isn’t your usual Fabergé egg exposed weave hypercar, all pouty, peacocking and safely wrapped in paint protection armour, its reason for existing merely to preserve a single digit mileage for the next collector.

Baka’s interior is a bomb site. Her vivid blue steering wheel is stained brown from 38,000 miles of hard graft through 50ºC deserts, subzero Arctic convoys, ten tenths racetrack torture and several deliberate crashes. The matted armrest is a petri dish of test driver mung and there’s a hole in the passenger seat that looks suspiciously like a cigarette burn. Apparently one of the engineers dropped his red hot soldering iron.

Baka is not her official name. It’s what I’ve christened this long suffering Rimac test bed. In a world exclusive for TG, we present the Nevera R.

Photography: Dean Smith

It’s the lighter, grippier, angrier and even more powerful version of what was already the fastest accelerating car in the world. Only, this one didn’t start life as an R. It was originally a normal Nevera, if you could ever deem a car with 1,888bhp and capable of 0–62mph in 1.8 seconds ‘normal’. Once the factory learned everything it could from its original form, it mutated into an R.

Those of you who really know your supercars will remember this isn’t a unique strategy for an ultra boutique unicorn stable. Pagani shapeshifted a Trigger’s broom Zonda, which spent 18 years shaking down tuned up V12s, magnesium suspension, stronger brakes and unobtanium exhausts in increasingly tatty bodywork. Somewhere along her one million kilometre career, Pagani’s engineers nicknamed their patchwork supercar ‘La Nonna’ before treating her to a concours restoration to celebrate Horacio P’s 60th birthday.

This Croatian grandmother (baka) remains at the coalface, blackened and wizened, doing the hard yards to ensure her children maintain the family tradition of blowtorching the Guinness Book of Records.

The original 120kWh battery that lies behind the seats, along the central spine and under the occupants’ pleasingly elevated feet was swapped out for a smaller, lighter 108kWh pack offering higher power output. That allowed all four motors to be uncorked, resulting in 2,078bhp. Welcome to the most powerful road car ever made.

To make sense of that titanic potential, Nevera Rs wear semi slick Cup tyres encircling new silicon coated brakes. Carryover Nevera suspension is enhanced with new calibration. While the laptops were plugged in, they rewrote the torque vectoring algorithms which individually finesse each motor a bajillion times a second so you cannot miss an apex.

During Baka’s superhero transformation montage, Rimac merged with a small Franco-German company called Bugatti. You may be familiar with its work. The chap who’s drawn every big Bug since the Veyron Super Sport, Frank Heyl, was tasked with creating a new look for the R without altering furiously expensive bits of tooling like headlights and glass.

Being one of those breeze whisperers like Adrian Newey who can read the very air we breathe, Frank’s managed to cook up a shape that’s actually more aero efficient than the standard Nevera, while generating up to 400kg of downforce. Most of that comes from the vast fixed wing, but it’s balanced by a fleet of other details – the jutting chin splitter, sideflicks, skirts, underbody vanes, enlarged diffuser... ‘aero’ cars are rarely pretty objects but the R turns the strangely anonymous Nevera into something with real evil intent, a malevolent glint in its angry gecko eyes missing from Rimacs until now.

Appropriately for a stealth fighter, the havoc Baka wreaks upon the human body was until now reserved for pilots departing aircraft carriers. The numbers (0–186mph in 8.66secs – half a second ahead of Nevera MkI, 1.5secs faster than a Koenigsegg Jesko and a 3.5 second drubbing beyond the 300mph Bugatti Chiron Super Sport) don’t do justice to how violently this car moves.

This is beyond driving. It’s teleportation. You need to have your braking plan A, B and C all signed off before you even look at the throttle, because if you haven’t considered every variable the R will have dropkicked you into a new dimension before the ‘oh bugger’ signal has even left your brain and set off for your foot. No car has ever so brutally exposed the feebleness of human reaction times. It’s not just the only car on Earth that accelerates faster than it brakes. It’s one of very few that moves faster than you can think.

This should be petrifying. Bizarrely, it isn’t. The second most amazing thing about the time travelling Nevera R is that everything else about it can make sense of its colossal punch.

As you descend into its roomy cabin, past doors which usefully scoop a big chunk of the roof out of your way, you notice the walls of its thickset carbon monocoque. You’d need to apply a 70,000Nm twisting force to bend that structure by a single degree. Fit slick tyres and sponsor stickers and it’s pretty much a race ready Le Mans chassis. The battery’s also a semi stressed member, adding even more rigidity. Given how the company literally exploded into the public consciousness, making the world’s quickest car among the safest is a good call.

You feel that strength and integrity coursing through the car as you crank through the driving modes on the rotary selector that juts from the dashboard like the shower controls in a posh hotel. Such a solid base means no compromise in how the suspension does it job. In Range and Cruise, it’s fabulously supple, smothering bumps with that luxury limousine feeling usually reserved for McLarens. Sport mode is perfectly tolerable on the road, and even Track doesn’t rob the Nevera R of its steely composure.

It steers gorgeously too. The response is beautifully crisp and instantly confidence inspiring. This is a wide, heavy machine but guiding it through a corner is completely instinctive. And when you press on just a tad, the torque vectoring joins in. You don’t sense any of the motors having a mind of their own, doing something weird or unpredictable. The car moves as one, never second guesses your commands, and settles into a pleasant flow. You could daily drive the world’s most powerful car. Didn’t expect that.

This particular road in northwest Croatia adjacent to the Slovenian border disrupts the peace because it’s been lazily surfaced with chippings, just like your local council does in return for all that tax you’re shelling out. Each stone rattles and ricochets around the wheelarches and pings against the carbon undertray. Baka’s not worried about being pebbledashed.

So, the Nevera R is comfortable, easy to use and ungodly fast. All things we’ve said about the regular version. Why does it exist at all? Well, there was an admission from company founder Mate Rimac last year that while the car’s numbers were stratospheric, its breadth was perhaps a little too grounded.

“When we developed the Nevera, an important part of the brief was that it should be a grand tourer,” he admitted. “But we’re relentlessly tweaking to customers’ desires, and many were looking for a car that really emphasised the Nevera’s cornering ability. We responded with the Nevera R – all the DNA of the record breaking Nevera, but lighter, faster and more focused.”

One day we’ll put one round a track – or bolt The Stig inside – to determine just how much more potent the R is. But even in carpet stripped, unpainted prototype form, there’s no track day special histrionics here. The brakes don’t squeal when cold. There are no 17-point racing harnesses to fumble with, and the seats are proper Sabelt chairs, not carbon shells with bits of old mouse mat glued where your shoulder blades and pelvis go. It even has metal door handles instead of token straps. A full suite of infotainment.

What troubled me was the notion of driving it on the public road. Would it be hopelessly unsatisfying, a futile exercise in hypercar excess? Well, you need restraint, that’s for sure. Because the R can use all of its monumental power, choosing when to deploy it gives you a 2,000bhp god complex.

I’ve never felt such a weight of responsibility in a road car before. You whoosh along propelled by innate superiority – there is simply nothing that could come along behind you that poses a threat. No law enforcement in the world could keep up. There have been a handful of other cars which can exceed 250 miles per hour, but none of them get there anything like this quickly – or indeed silently. It’s an eerie feeling, pootling along at say, 50-ish miles an hour, knowing that in four or five seconds from this moment if you so choose, you could be the fastest moving landborne object on the continent.

Not for very long. The estimated range of the downsized battery pack is around 250 miles, but thousands of recharge cycles later this one reckons on less than 200 when it’s being coached along gently and that plummets if you listen to the devil on your shoulder. It’s addictive, but you’ll be somewhere between tummy butterflies and full blown nausea if you don’t tense your core first.

It’s possible nothing will supersede the Nevera R’s record pulverising lunatic acceleration for a while

There is a way to enjoy full throttle without putting your brain in a centrifuge. One final twizzle of the mode dial unlocks Drift mode. A freewheeling front axle and 100 per cent rear motor power. It’ll lunch a set of rears in a few hundred yards, painting thick, tarry lines in its wake and towing along a smoke trail that doesn’t fully clear for a quarter of an hour.

While photographer Dean and videographer Charlie grab some closeups, I mull the R from a safe distance. It’s a conflicting creation. On the one hand, it renders every performance car I’ve ever driven obsolete. Nothing else is as brutally, instantly quick, yet it’s so competent and complete, all from a company founded in 2009 by a 21 year old with no industry experience, no nepo baby leg up.

But even Mate himself admits candidly that he can’t sell them. The V12 GMA T.50 and Pagani Utopia are sold out. So is his V16 hybrid brain dump, the Bugatti Tourbillon. Meanwhile Rimac promised to make 150 Neveras and build slots remain unfilled. “Up to 40” Nevera Rs will be made, for a £300,000 premium over the £2m base car. But the market has spoken. When a Tesla crossover can outrun an Aventador, EV hypercars are a tough sell as Lotus and Pininfarina have discovered. There’s tumbleweed where Porsche’s and McLaren’s entries were going to be. Pagani cancelled its own. 

Perhaps the Nevera R will apply a million horsepower defibrillator to this motoring cul de sac. It looks hornier, has even sillier specs and yet the scariest thing about it is how easy it is to drive. For me it only works as part of a collection – as a sensation you simply can’t experience anywhere else, to indulge on a day when you don’t fancy one of the open gate manuals, 9,000rpm V10s, or twin turbo catapults that lurk in your arsenal.

One thing might guarantee the Nevera R’s status as a future icon. It isn’t going to be bettered. Across the world, electric supercar programmes are being cancelled faster than Star Wars spin offs. Mate Rimac has speculated his next hypercar won’t be 100 per cent electric. So despite the never ending power wars, it’s possible nothing will supersede the Nevera R’s record pulverising lunatic acceleration for a while. And among all the EV hypercars, few will have as many stories to tell as Baka, the highest miler of them all. Like all beloved grandmas, she’s earning her retirement.