FIRST LOOK 2107hp Rimac Nevera R 0 60mph in 1 74 seconds

I'm willing to bet that literally no one ever climbed out of a Rimac Nivera and thought, oh dear, that needs more power. I wish it was faster around my local racetrack, but Mate Rimacs can't sit still and some of the hypercar market is not convinced by EVs. This is how a Rimac answers back with the Nivera R. Now, I'll talk you around all the visual tweaks in a moment, but let's just get straight to the power. Rimac Nivera, 1,888 brake horsepower. Nivera R, 2,078 brake horsepower. Now, let's just lay some context on those numbers. The fastest Ferrari ever around the Fiorano test track is the SF90XX, and this has more power than two of them. That makes for acceleration numbers that just defy belief. All your reference points are just blown away. 0-62 is the same as the standard car because it's limited by what tires can put on the road, but it's still 1.81 seconds. This thing gets from 0-186 miles an hour or 300 kph, 0.6 seconds quicker than that one. It's also 3.5 seconds faster than a Bugatti Chiron Supersport, 1.5 seconds quicker than a Koenigsegg Jesko. We're used to EVs that blow your mind leaving the line, but normally they tail off into three figures. Not this one. How have they done it? Well, because it's an EV, I can't just open the bonnet and show you, but it has got four new motors which are not just more powerful than that car's, they've also got the latest, greatest, cleverer version of that Rimac torque vectoring technology to share and shuffle the torque between all four corners. The battery powering those motors has also been upgraded. Capacity is 108 kilowatt hours, but the chemistry's been changed. It's lighter, but it's more about giving you that higher sustained performance. You bring it to a racetrack, you can go flat out for longer. Which explains why the bodywork has had these upgrades as well. How do you tell someone's got a Nivera R? Here's the details. You'll see at the front that that nose cone off the old car is gone. You've now got this angry gecko face. New front splitter, entirely different air management around this section of the car. Brakes have been upgraded. New silicon layer on your ceramic discs to improve stopping performance. Great big carbon fiber exposed section in the door here, looks great. And wider side skirt. Then you come around to the headline act. Yes, where your standard Nivera got a modest rear wing, this one has a monster. Fully exposed carbon fiber, triple support, looks like an Aventador SVJ. And the numbers are geeky. 15% more downforce overall, 10% better aero efficiency, 10% less understeer, and 3.8 seconds saved on a lap of the Nardo test track. Now that is terribly impressive, except, well, Nardo is a private test track. It's closed to the public. We can't go and see a car go around there. Kind of begs the question, I wonder how fast one of these would go around Silverstone, or Laguna Seca, or the Nürburgring. Hopefully, one day we will find out. Because after all, the whole point of the Nivera R is kind of a response from Mattei Rimac to his customers, who were saying, yeah, we appreciate that the normal Nivera is a great sort of GT, everyday hypercar, but we'd actually kind of like something that was a bit more of a ripper around a racetrack. I have to say, though, really doesn't feel kind of stripped out and Spartan racetrack ready in here. It's still very nicely appointed. There's a lot more kind of Alcantara trim instead of leather, and they've painted the exposed carbon on the dashboard here to match the paintwork. But otherwise, seats are comfortable. There's lots of screens, lots of equipment, and don't just think it's a kind of soulless lap time king either, because you can still twizzle this knob here, select drift mode, and tell all 2,078 brake horsepower to send you sideways. Madness. Only 40 Nivera R's are going to be built, each costing just shy of two million pounds. I have no doubt that it will happily smash lap records and rupture internal organs. It's just funny, though, isn't it? Even Matej Rimac himself has said that EV hypercars aren't selling like V12 or V16 ones are. Seems crazy, doesn't it? Machine this wild, numbers this amazing, but will it be the future of the hypercar after all?