CZINGER 21C
This is the Czinger 21C – a 3D printed hypercar with Laguna Seca lap record pedigree. We’re first to drive a very early prototype. Prepare for take-off...
Part car, part sculpture, part speeding fine – Jack Rix goes to the States to get to grips with the bonkers-quick 21C
I’ve just watched, hands on cheeks from the pitlane, as it ripped its own roof off down the straight at Willow Springs. A polycarbonate panel peeled back like a can of tuna and sent cartwheeling into the air... ta-da! The Czinger 21C Spider gets an early reveal. To be fair it did have one of our GoPros suckered to it (with Czinger’s permission) which at somewhere north of 150mph was clearly undoing the good work of that wing, and imparting some fairly serious lift. Cue a swift operation to reattach with black tack and gaffer tape. Good as new.
Apparently the beautifully finished bodywork, perched atop of this prototype chassis and powertrain, was only fitted a few weeks ago to give potential customers something to coo over at Monterey Car Week... and had only been driven up to 20mph until now. Oh well, such are the trials and errors of working with an early car. Production of the 80 21Cs, costing $2m a pop, isn’t scheduled to start in earnest until 2023, but you don’t turn down the chance to be first to drive something this bonkers... even if it is a work in progress.
Rewind four hours and more fun and games. We’re on the road, about 20 minutes from Willow, surrounded by a forest of wind turbines whistling gently in the breeze. I’m behind the wheel, sweating like a sumo wrestler playing squash, and not because there’s no aircon yet... but because I’ve stalled on the wrong side of the road while turning left. A minivan has just crested the hill and approaches at speed. Fortunately, Kevin Czinger (the boss) and Luiz Oliveira (head of powertrain) leap to my rescue from the car in front and flag the traffic down as I restart the engine, bung a load of revs at it and haul myself out of harm’s way.
You see, the 21C currently has a straight cut racing-style dog box and a hair trigger hand clutch for getting off the line, which makes things tricky, especially when you’re turning hard left and the paddle has to swap hands as you’re feeding it out. On the flat, you can employ the two e-motors on the front axle to get you rolling forwards, and use that momentum to smooth the process, but I’d stopped on an upslope which negated the creep. Fortunately, it’s a temporary solution – a new Xtrac single-clutch auto arrives early next year, which promises to make low speed stuff not quite as life or death.
Spool back further to the previous afternoon and we’re on Spunky Canyon Road – chosen for its topography, not comedic value – for perhaps the most bizarre moment of all. It’s my first taste of piloting the 21C: I’m drinking in the brilliance of the central driving position and the 360˚ visibility as the scenery rushes past the windows and the clouds slide by overhead. Propulsion, however, comes not from the V8 behind me, nor the motors out front, but by lifting my foot from the brake. Gravity is my fuel as we
“I’M DRINKING IN THE BRILLIANCE OF THE CENTRAL DRIVING POSITION AND THE 360˚ VISIBILITY”
freewheel down a long hill to get some car-to-car photography in the bag. Why? Because Czinger’s new engine guru (former power unit engineer at Mercedes-AMG F1, a man who knows a thing or two about high-performance hybrids) Luiz Oliveira is on a plane back from his holidays in Hawaii and they don’t want to fire it up without his laptop close at hand. Fair enough. Fortunately, chapter one in the how-to-be-awriter-for-TopGear-handbook is entitled Whatever It Takes.
Rewind a bit more, and our 21C odyssey started earlier that day on a high – at the Blackbird Airpark in Palmdale, California. We arrive to find the 21C not being upstaged despite being the meat in a supersonic stealth plane sandwich. On one side the SR-71 Blackbird, on the other its precursor the A-12 – still the fastest manned planes to ever fly and hands down the most advanced aircraft ever, relative to the tech available at their conception. We stand gawping for several minutes before photographer Dave – clearly a fanboy – starts spouting random, mind-blowing SR-71 facts. I learn that the entire fuselage is a fuel tank, and because engineers needed to account for superheating and expansion of the titanium skin at cruising speeds, it leaked fuel through the panel gaps on the runway. I also learn the A-12, this crazy slice of reconnaissance perfection, was developed in under two years by a crack team of 135 engineers led by Kelly Johnson, and the SR-71 took flight a little over two years after that. This is significant.
Kevin Czinger claims he took inspiration from the SR-71 when he was devising the 21C – not for the styling or powertrain – but for the skunkworks mentality that made it possible to build a spy plane capable of cruising at Mach 3.2 at 85,000 feet in such an incredibly tight time frame. He wants his Californian hypercar, like this Californian plane, to be a giant leap... a tech reset that challenges everything we know about how we build cars. Except, the Czinger 21C might have four wheels and a windscreen, but it isn’t really a car at all, it’s a demonstrator for what’s possible with digital design and 3D printing.
Any part of this car that can be 3D printed is: the suspension arms, the crash structures, the dashboard, the exhaust mufflers to name just a handful of the Ctrl+P components, all printed from Inconel, aluminium and titanium alloys. Peer into the engine bay and it’s more anatomy lesson than automotive tradition – sinewy, organic shapes looking like tendon and muscle bolted to simple off-the-shelf extrusions. The immediate benefits are obvious – putting material only where you need it reduces weight and builds strength – but it runs deeper than that. By 3D printing the gearbox casing, for example, you can integrate the heat exchangers into the internal structure, rather than hanging them off the side, saving space and improving efficiency.
And when you have complete flexibility in the size and shape of components you can print, there’s complete flexibility in how you design and build that car with none of the costs and baggage associated with traditional car factories. A modular, fully automated car manufacturing system made up of 10m x 10m cells that can be switched to build one model in the morning, and a different one in the afternoon. That’s where Czinger’s going, licensing that tech, that’s where the big bucks are. But as Kevin Czinger told me when I first met him two years ago: “If you’ve got the tools to build something totally off the hook, go for it.”
Well, he went for it. Driven by Kevin’s love of superbikes, and his insistence on a 1+1 seating layout, the proportions are extraordinary: