I was actually going to respond to HighOctaneLove clarifying that perhaps people watch Jezza et al because they're more entertaining than they are informative, yet at the same time, they hold a very significant cultural sway on the impractical, pointy ends of the car market. So your criticism that his reviews may not be a good reflection of the car for all his editorial slant might be pertinent there.
At any rate, I was going to finish off writing BSLL stuff, but felt it relatively important to demonstrate by example. That is to say, I have recently received another supercar for inspection and testing, so without further ado, here is the review, in my own usual style, and once again, not pulling any punches either!
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Now that the a new class of car superlative to even the Supercar has been born, new challengers to the ultra performance sector will always be tested by this yardstick. With the increasingly lofty standards, technical achievements and iconography that these cars achieve, it is simply not sufficient to produce something that works, or even goes fast, but leaps out and grabs you by your collar and dunks you in the Antarctic ocean. Does this one do the trick?
2014 Apex Street-TrackThis is one of the most exclusive of exclusive cars, an allegedly street legal version of a purpose-developed track racer. Yet strangely enough, this was not created for homologation purposes at all, seeing as a maximum of only five examples (one less than the Agera 1:One). An exercise in technical showcase, perhaps? With these kinds of numbers, one would hope that this car was a statement, with such great impact that it would skyrocket the brand into legend to boost its fiscal viability elsewhere.
With this in mind, the star rating is what it is, a guideline as to how the car performs in each of the categories relative to other cars in its class, and expectations. I'll be presenting my own impressions, however, which may or may not have a different emphasis, not to mention synthesis. Given the brief with which the car was billed, and the fact it had been sent to me for reviewing, I assumed that it would be an ultimate driving machine, and hang everything else.
Vital Statistics
Top Speed: 337.7km/h
Acceleration (0-100km/h): 3.8 seconds
Power: 836hp@8900rpm
Torque: 739Nm@7000rpm
Fuel Economy: 10.19l/100km
Material Cost: $67154
Production Units: 1690
Weight: 1258kg
ne might imagine my palpable surprise, then, when out of the truck rolled what I can only describe as executive restraint skinned over a sports coupe. Chrome detailing and grille, with smooth lines masking a strangely bulbous nose. A tapered rear end vaguely reminiscient of the F-Type, if not for the telltale quad exhaust and whacking big double spoiler that all but completely obliterated rearward vision. Ah, yes, hello supercar.
Returning my attention to the front, I was immediately concerned by the completely smooth face of the bodywork. It was all very elegant, yes, but there was not a single hint of counterbalancing splitter or bodywork to reduce front lift. I desperately hoped that were not the case, for given the aggressiveness of the rear wing, that would surely spell a lot of trouble at higher speeds. Given that discrepant finding compared to the brief, I had a growing gut feeling it was shaping up to be one of those cars that I preferred to experience from the passenger seat, as I ushered our semi-tame racing driver, Kai Kristensen, into the driver's seat.
In stark contrast to the exterior, the cabin was more of a hint at what was to come. At least, mostly. The racing bucket seats and spartan interior with almost no trim, and hollow door frame, was definitely in line with expectations. Our slight nervousness at a lack of rollcage was perhaps more telling of our own habits, because the other safety features were plenty up to scratch (definitely more a priority than on our own models at any rate), and the carbon fiber frame was plenty enough to hold its own. Yet on the other hand again, the flimsy plastic panels clearly visible from the inside was an odd choice, clashing with the overall impression and throwing me for another loop. What was this car meant to be, really?
Then we started the car up, and the spanners started clattering in the works. Fortunately not in terms of noise, the rumble and roar of the V8 was intensely gratifying... if altogether deafening. Feeling like you're getting punched in the ears every time you hit the gas can be part of the package deal for many sports and race cars, but the Apex didn't even have a muffler, so I have no idea how they expect it to pass
any noise restriction regulations.
This was not a particularly encouraging time to further inform us that the car was tuned such that it could only run on 100RON. Now, in Australia, we don't exactly have 100RON. In fact, in most countries around the world, I wouldn't expect any service station you could easily get to, to have 100RON. At least here, anything that is called 100RON is in fact 10% EtOH, and well, when it comes to a (not actually) "street-legal" converted race car, that's not something I'd want to be putting in the tank. So we had to resort to using our own supply of race fuel, which we do happen to get for the purposes of refuelling our own race prototypes (that never run on an open public road). As you can imagine, this put a slight limit on our ability to test drive, tempered slightly by the car's mysteriously good economy.
After all that, finally, Kai navigated us onto our test track (with more than one flesh-melting scraping noise as the car pulled out of the drive... low ride height, check), clicked the car into first, and we were off! Supercar fast off the line? Yes, technically. It squeezed through the first hundred in barely under four seconds, but what was more impressive was the way it kept strongly pulling all the way through the second hundred, and the third hundred too. In fact, the decent acceleration force didn't truly taper off until it was in seventh, on the way to a top speed of 337.7km/h. The quarter mile was dusted off in under eleven, and the kilometer (and three hundred), in a bit over eighteen seconds. Not bad... not particularly outstanding in the class, at least, not anymore. Had this been maybe four, five years ago, this would have been bonkers, but with the new benchmarks, it becomes just that much harder to make an impression.
Now for the nitpicking: I must confess that when it comes to modern race engines (even ones that have been incompletely converted for street use), I am a staunch supporter of the five-valve-a-head setup. Especially when it comes to moderately large displacement V8 blocks, I can't see any real purpose for VTEC to kick in, yo. It's heavier, more complicated and therefore less reliable, isn't necessarily any more economical, and unless set up perfectly, causes lumpy torque curves with peaks in funny places, especially with aggressive valve liftoff, and ultimately cannibilises midrange torque, where it's more effective for transmission setup. Regardless of your stance on the debate on where (if anywhere) VTEC belongs, it's a waste of engineering money here. If you're reading this with intent to make a brutal race engine, you're almost guaranteed to have better outcomes across the board with VVT alone and that one extra valve.
That much I had time to think about while the speedo climbed steadily, until both Kai and I confirmed what we had dreaded all along: there was no aero on the front whatsoever. Pulling some ridiculous amount of lift, the front end felt rather vague coming into the banked corner doing three thirty (something we shouldn't have been, but were becoming depressingly accustomed to since starting this guest review stint), let alone wandering this way and that under the slightest tug of the steering wheel at anywhere above two hundred or so. The suspension was very nicely balanced and responsive, which would have been great, were it not for that horribly imbalanced aero that made about as much sense as the wings on the tail of a Chatham chav special. Which, and I cannot over-emphasise this, is a real shame, because at lower speeds, the car managed to achieve something reserved for the best of supercars: riding all the bumps on public roads nicely (for a racing car, at least) and with zero fuss, while remaining nippy in the corners, with a fairly excellent 20m circle test of 1.44g (albeit, this car was running race-quality semi-slicks). It helps that for an engine of its size, the car has an excellent weight distribution. The Apex was a hoot around the roundabouts, I'll give it that much. And given how crap Australian roads can be out in the sticks, that I'm saying this about the ride quality, is worth something. It almost made the lack of stability control make some kind of sense, though its absence was more of an academic eyebrow raiser in the current market. To have traction control but not stability control? Why not? Doesn't traction control already impair the purity of the driving experience yet those who might want to buy it might also want stability control so they don't bin it into the barriers (especially at speed?)
Other things that bothered me about this car included the seven speed transmission. Frankly, given the power curve and top speed, the car doesn't even quite warrant a seven speed, especially not one with the lower gears spaced so close. Switching down a gear, the rev counter still stuck us firmly in an indeterminate place in the middle of the valley of the power curve... but then again that's the VTEC issue again. Kai and I were quite happy to bet that the car would have instantly been a couple of percent faster around the track if it dropped the VTEC in favour for 40v, used an aggressively timed VVT only and ran six gears instead of 7. There's more than enough torque to go around without getting lost in the cogs.
Then there were the brakes. Peering between the spokes of the wheels, the discs seemed rather a bit... smaller than I was used to. The manual mentioned something about extra grippy race-bred pads for stopping power, which was, I guess, nice... to compensate for undersized brakes. The stopping distance was certainly excellent, but for something more controllable, comfort-oriented twelve inch fronts and maybe ten or eleven inch rears would have been more appropriate, and ultimately significantly quicker around the track, too.
Back in the garage, we popped the car on the rack and pored over the papers to see if we could get to the bottom of this rather confusing swirl of mixed attributes. We were astounded by the amount of engineering and quality that went into the block and heads of the engine, accounting for well over 80% of the time produced to make the car. For all that, the end result just seemed a little... underwhelming. There was no real outstanding feature, package or impression here to show for all that time, and part of the reason was because for all the supreme fundamentals, the fuel system, with a single throttle body, was essentially bottlenecking all that potential. As for the rest of the car, some of the components were good quality, whereas in other places, the manufacturers had gone completely nuts, but we weren't sure of the specific rationale for all of that. Not that this really mattered for anything other than our own curiosity. As a package, the car managed a performance equivalent to that of a Koenigsegg CCX, which sounds like it's plenty fast, except for the fact that was so five years ago, and running on tyres you can't actually buy from a dealer (we would know, it's the same grade as our own preferred tyres).
What was this car supposed to be again? It was supposed to be an ultra rare street-legal version of a race car. Without seeing the race car, we can't really tell exactly what was altered, but by itself, the car already failed from the outset as we couldn't last ten minutes on the public road without being pulled over by the cops, nor could we actually go anywhere without having a race fuel supplier on speed dial. Even those things aside, we couldn't tell whether the car was even supposed to be based on a race car, or was it a supercar with executive touches, or an executive car trying to be a supercar? The tyres, the noise, the 836hp, even the spine chilling ear grinding scrapage of undertray on the road thanks to a ridiculously low ride height, all those things were racecar. But the styling, the mind-blowing lack of front splitter, the funny VTEC, the somewhat lackluster transmission... all of those things really held it back.
In this realm, six of one and half a dozen of the other does not make for a full carton of eggs (that is, if your egg cartons come in boxes of a dozen... if not, then my bad). It makes for a mess.
Given the brief, here's a general list of what we would have done to rectify the issues we encountered:
- Splitter on the front. SO MUCH SPLITTER.
- Replaced the VTEC with 5 valve a head system and VVT only, with high cam profile.
- At least twin body, if not throttle per cylinder configuration, but if this is a racing engine, why the heck is it not direct injection?
- The block and head have too much quality for minimal gain, why not redirect time from that into the fuel injection and transmission?
- RON requirements are too high, the ignition timing can be dropped without losing much power. 98RON is a far more appropriate fuel for street use.
- Dropped the superfluous cog and made the higher ratios a bit closer. 50km/h in first is too short for a race car.
- Reduce the tyre profile significantly, 30-40 is probably better for sporty driving. Given the kind of tyres the car is running, one would expect the rears to be wider. A lot wider.
- Adjusted brake balance as described above.
- Changed the undertray to downforce. It does wonders for mitigating the discrepancies in front-rear downforce. Then it's easier to balance so there's no more ridiculous amounts of lift and the car becomes more Gumpert Apollo and less flying car. Also, got rid of the superfluous ventilation.
- Slightly tweaked suspension with more aggressive camber, and reduced bottom out by raising ride height. That scraping really slows you down around the track.
All of these things were small changes, but even with significantly reduced costs and engineering time (which we knew was no object anyway), we are sure they would add up to a very significant improvement in performance on the track in every single way without sacrificing any comfort whatsoever.*
AssessmentPerformance-
Funny engine setup gets in the way of some really good potential grunt. Output isn't lacking, but the times don't exactly stand out.
Ride-
For a supercar, the Apex sure handles the bumps well. In fact, not just for a supercar, for any kind of car.
Handling-
Apex has produced the rare model that has a superb balance of weight and suspension, which is great for a race car. All there is to do is fix that blasted aero, and not have it wandering into the runoff at high speeds.
Refinement-
NADAWhat refinement? This isn't even road legal. Get a muffler on the car before you even think about selling it for street use.
Equipment-
Adequate in the safety or the assists, though the lack of stability control was a bit mystifying. Not that, in the hands of any competent driver, this car really needs it of course, but there's not guarantee the driver will be competent...
Quality-
Much time went into many of the components of this car. Some more than others. The four stars here is an objective average of all aspects, though the plastic panels was a real turn-off.
Reliability-
We don't expect race cars to be rock solid. This one was no exception. Given the quality of most of the parts, we traced the main potential issue to the high redline of the engine.
Running costs-
All things considered, the car is surprisingly accessible... too much so given its rarity. If it were madder, had 400 more bhp, breathed fire etc. buyers would have gladly tolerated the increased running costs. As it is, you can't even tell it's a race-based car on the bottom line alone!
Safety-
For a relatively light supercar, the carbon body and the premium safety features boosted its rating significantly. No complaints, except, again, those plastic panels. Flimsy stuff for a race car.
Overall-
There were the good bits. There were the bad bits. Overall, the sum total looks pretty average for what it offers, but the fundamental flaws in the car prevent it from being anything like what it set out to be. A race car ought to surpass the limits of mere mortal production cars. They ought to pull times in the low 1:10s around the Top Gear Test Track, or around the 7 minute mark around Green Hell, and corner harder at high speeds than they do around the shopping centre roundabout. There's work to be done here, if Apex wants to be a real contender for the next round.
* To the creator of the original car: if you would like the .lua demonstrating all these changes, I can send a revised file to you.
Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:37 am 
I found all my car files using the search on windows.
Insulting Top Gear? Have some of this. Why Top Gear is a Quality Motoring Show
but we don't necessarily have to promote a formula... That also depends on the target market. In this case I review to see if the car is as fast and good at racing as it could be, and comment on how it might be fixed, because while there are multiple ways of achieving certain results, when it comes to super fast, certain fundamentals have to be done right or it's not just "character", it's a bad race car 
