► All you need to know about the Czinger 21C
► American hypercar snatches Goodwood Timed Shootout record
► We meet one half of founding duo, Kevin Czinger
There’s a new, fastest production car record holder at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and it’s this: the Czinger 21C.
A Rattlesnake Green example of this wild hypercar, driven by veteran racing driver Chris Ward, clocked a 48.82sec run up the hill during the Timed Shootout on the Sunday of the 2024 event (pictured below), toppling the 49.32sec record held by the Rimac Nevera set in 2023.
Before the Czinger 21C – pronounced like ‘zinger’ with a soft ‘s’ just before it – took its timed runs up the hill on the final day of the FoS event, we grabbed some time with one half of the father/son founding duo, and CEO, of this all-American hypercar creator, Kevin Czinger.
What the hell is Czinger?!
‘Well, I started a technology company called Divergent Technologies,’ Kevin Czinger, CEO and founder of Czinger (pictured below) tells us, ‘and Divergent has Czinger as a product company under it. My son [Lukas, co-founder and chief operating officer] joined me shortly after and we’re equal partners.’
‘My two older brothers were car mechanics and racecar builders, and you can have really cool tools doing that sort of thing. But it’s not that cool unless you’re doing your own thing. This is us doing our own thing: there’s no real badass American sports car brand, so we’re going to always take those tools and be a step ahead of everybody else that we do things for, and just create the most badass vehicies,’ adds Kevin. Czinger has recruited engineers, technicians and high-ranking executives from places like Mercedes AMG’s F1 team, Honda, Red Bull Racing and more.
And the Czinger 21C certainly looks badass, with performance figures to back it up. The 21C uses a bespoke, mid-mounted 2.88-litre flat-crank V8 with twin turbos and 800V of hybrid assistance. Peak power is a staggering 1250bhp with a 11,000rpm redline, and weighing just 1250kg, 0-62mph takes just 1.88 seconds.
Czinger also says the hybrid system consists of an e-motor on each front wheel, while regeneration is carried out through braking as well. The 21C’s V8 will also accept a range of fuels – including synthetic e-fuels.
Three versions have been created depending on your requirement: the standard 1250bhp 21C is designed for handling over top speed; the 21C Vmax is the sleek aerodynamic model that’ll clock 253mph, and the 21C Blackbird that’s designed for track use and deploys that max 1350bhp.
‘Unlike most of the supercars you see [at Goodwood], we did this all in three years. A car that can do a quarter mile in 8.1 seconds, but it’s a completely street-legal with zero crash exemptions or emissions exemptions. It can be sold off the dealer lot, and yet it can blow the doors off of anything,’ Kevin tells us.
Partially why it can be sold in most markets is the fact that it has a central driving position. There are two seats, but the passenger sits directly behind the driver for ultimate aerodynamic efficiency.
But Czinger’s real secret sauce comes from harnessing Divergent’s massive amount of available computing power and leveraging more than 700 patents. ‘I have 219 of those,’ says Kevin, ‘and Lukas has 80. We’re both engineers, partners and different generations… and he’s my boss!’ On top of that, the 21C’s chassis is 3D printed for the most tensile strength using the least amount of materials.
Wait, what? A 3D printed chassis?
Yes, it’s what separates Czinger from the ruling classes of the hypercar hierarchy – and is something the brand calls its ‘Bio-Logic’ technology. There’s a central carbonfibre tub for the passenger cell, which is then added to with a 3D-printed alloy. What results is something that looks alien, and almost organic – and yet the structure was crafted and designed entirely by machines.
‘We build our own 3D printers, and all of these materials are generated internally using machine learning,’ Kevin tells us. When I point out that it looks organic, rather than computer made, Kevin responds: ‘If you look at your garden as a design space for a set of ecosystem conditions, you’re flowing materials like potassium, nitrogen, CO2, H20 within that system. Then evolution, another system, comes along that optimises the structures of flora and fauna against those constraints and conditions.
‘Just imagine those engineering constraints in a construction system. It’s not like we’re trying to do anything that looks like anything, it’s simply that this is mirroring an evolutionary process. But what takes eons based on trial and error with evolution, we can simulate it in microseconds.’
So this is the end result…
Yup – a circa £2m hypercar that can topple records.
As well as the new Goodwood one, in August 2021, the 21C smashed the lap record at Laguna Seca. Driver Joel Miller set a time of 1:25.44sec in ‘ideal’ conditions at the fabled California track.
The 21C took more than two seconds out of the previous benchmark of 1:27.62sec, set by a McLaren Senna in October 2019. Riding on Michelin Pilot Sport Cup2R tyres, Czinger said Miller also managed to break the previous record on two other attempts.
‘Building a new car is not easy and this group built one fast car,’ said Miller in 2021, reflecting on his run. ‘What the powertrain is capable of doing is absolutely mind blowing at maximum power.’ Chief engineer Ewan Baldry agreed, adding that the ‘most exciting part is that we know we have more performance to come.’ The success at Laguna Seca has been repeated, with the 21C annihilating the previous record – this time held by a McLaren P1 – by six seconds.