MATE RIMAC
The Croatian car boss on drifting E30s and converting Opel Speedsters
“I ALWAYS WANTED TO RACE, BUT MY PARENTS DIDN’T LISTEN TO ME”
I’ve been a petrolhead since the day I was born, although I don’t really know why – my family didn’t have anything to do with cars. My mother tells me that, before I could walk or talk, I used to pretend that my hands hurt and she’d put me in the car to make me stop crying. She has all my drawings from kindergarten, too – they’re all of cars.
I got my moped licence at 14 years old, my motorbike licence at 16, and then my proper driving licence at 17. My first car was a first-generation Skoda Octavia 1.9TDI, but my first real car was an E30 3-Series – the 323i. I had a friend who was a mechanic and together we replaced the engine with the 2.5-litre six-cylinder from an E34 5-Series.
I always wanted to race, but my parents didn’t listen to me, so that was the easiest way to start – buy an old RWD car, some spare tyres and off you go.
We went to drift races in the E30, but eventually the engine blew up. That’s how this whole EV thing started actually. I’d won lots of national competitions in Croatia for electronic innovations and had two patents when I was 17. I was building all of this electronic stuff in my garage, while also fooling around with cars at the same time. So, when the BMW’s engine went, I decided to convert it into an EV. Actually, the real story is I wanted to fit it with the V8 from an E39 M5, but those engines were €20k at the time.
After I’d converted it, I went racing. Everybody laughed at first, but I kept improving it, started winning and eventually broke five FIA world records for acceleration. I had this race against a dragster. You know – American, 1,000bhp+ fire-spitting V8, huge tyres, etc. I was sitting next to him thinking “Oh s**t”. I was in this silent, little electric E30. The lights turned green... he had a bit of a bad start and I had a perfect one. I heard him screaming behind me, but I started to pull away, more and more until the finish. That was a great moment.
I bought an Opel Speedster and converted that to electric, too – though not before my friend had rolled it while we were testing the internal combustion engine.
At the time, I thought I could make a business out of building EV conversions for other people, but the 3-Series showed me how many issues there are converting a car. The electric motor was in the gearbox tunnel, the engine bay was empty and the batteries were where the rear seat used to be, so I had lost the rear seat and the car had a super-high centre of gravity. It was massively quick, but also super wobbly, and very tricky to drive. I realised it doesn’t make sense to convert combustion-engined cars. You have to build EVs from scratch.
For 10 years after that, I put everything into the company and didn’t really own any cars, but I finally treated myself when the first really big investors joined. I’ve recently bought a BMW Z4, a Ducati Panigale and a new M5. I don’t have a Concept_One because I’m not a 100 per cent stakeholder in the company – if I want a product, I have to pay for it. The C_Two I really want to buy... I will have one eventually.
I’m usually modest, I think, but if there’s one thing I do well, it’s drive. I think it’s important. If I wasn’t a car guy and couldn’t drift around a corner, I couldn’t make decisions about my own cars. You have to be a good driver to understand what the car should do and how it could do things differently.