Stile Bertone Mantide

Jason Castriota, the design director, and the brains behind the car, has form too, having helped create the Ferrari 599 GTB and the Maserati Gran Turismo, while working at Pininfarina, the rival Italian design house. He was also the man responsible for the Ferrari P4/5, a one-off collector’s car based on the Enzo that cost a reported $4m (£2.6m), and the Maserati Birdcage 75th, a concept car to celebrate 75 years of Pininfarina.

So why haven’t you heard of it? Well, for a start, it has only just been seen in the flesh. It was officially launched at the Shanghai motor show at the end of last month, and only one version of the car exists. The rest will be built to order. As importantly, the cost is so eye-wateringly high that Stile Bertone is banking on the fact that news of its car will spread through word of mouth among the gilded billionaires of the world rather than through the mass media.

Its looks alone should be enough to awaken interest. The gull-wing doors use clear polycarbonate for the windows and roof, which means that when they’re closed the top half of the Mantide looks like the teardrop canopy of a fighter jet. Likewise, the gaping air intake at the front could be straight off an F-18 Hornet.

The buttresses at the rear reduce drag and help create the downforce needed to keep the car stable at high speed. Even the wheels are a special event — made by the British company Dymag Racing UK, they feature carbon-fibre rims and aluminium spokes, meaning they each weigh about 9lb less than an equivalent alloy wheel.

The Mantide also pays subtle homage to Bertone greats from the past — the angles on those rear wheelarches echo the original Lamborghini Countach. Unlike that car, however, the Mantide is not mid-engined, but front-engined with rear-wheel drive.

Underneath the body lies a bit of a surprise. While you might expect to find a Maserati or Ferrari chassis and powertrain, the Mantide’s donor car is a Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 with a 638bhp supercharged V8. The power is fed to the rear wheels via a six-speed manual transmission. Castriota has done a lot of development miles in the Mantide and describes the performance as “truly staggering”.

With the use of lightweight materials such as carbon fibre, the Mantide is a full 220lb lighter than the already explosively fast ZR1, and according to Castriota, it feels more dynamic, thanks to the weight loss — it retains the ZR1’s near 50/50 weight distribution, too.

Stile Bertone claims that the Mantide will be the world’s greatest street-legal performance car. This might not be the usual PR puff: in support, Stile Bertone cites the fact that a production-spec ZR1 lapped the famous Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany in 7min 26.4sec, one of the fastest lap times for a true production car.

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