Since its inception as Total Ultima in 1992, the premise from the British marque motoring company has always been thuddingly simple: deliver the world’s fastest supercar, in component form, to your front door with everything you need to build it right out of the box. Utilising British design cunning and American V8 brute force, early models certainly lived up to that promise, but there was escaping the fact that despite the impressive performance, they always looked a little out of place in a supercar line-up: too plastic, too raw, too I-built-it-myself-in-a-shed. Not any more.
The Ultima RS is, in technical terms, batsh*t crazy. Looking every bit the Le Mans inspired race car it is, the RS is a road legal machine that will get from 0 - 60mph in 2.3 seconds, and will only slow down at 250mph because the gearing components physically can’t let it go any quicker. It really is that fast.
The muscle, as always, comes from over the pond, via a supercharged Chevrolet V8 delivering 1200bhp, able to make the Ultima do a quarter mile in 9.2 seconds. Wrapped around the engine is British thinking, from the roof scoop, to the carbon side splitters and colossal rear spoiler. The Ultima process is to bolt it altogether, push it into the wind tunnel and tweak everything until it becomes an aerodynamic dream.
Anything that slices through air that fast of course needs to be able to stop, and the AP Racing brakes will bring the machine from 100mph to zero in 3.3 seconds (if you’ve ever tried that, your eyes actually attempt to leave your head which is quite an astonishing sensation).
With so many different configurations available, how much you spend is really up to you. If you want to build one, the lead time for a self assembly machine is 22 weeks, and if you would rather Ultima built it for you (but where’s the fun in that?), it’s a lead time of two years. To the shed!
