Italy-based coach builder Ares Design comes with an all-new creation based on the Corvette C8, which founder and CEO Dany Bahar revealed in an interview with the British Top Gear. However, the S Project, as the supercar will be called, resembles the donor car in few ways.
With the S Project, Ares Design wants to ‘go back to the origin’, as ex-Lotus CEO Bahar himself puts it. According to him, many of his customers are afraid of actually driving their technically complicated and ‘too powerful’ hypercars. The S Project stands on the chassis of the Corvette C8 and also gets its naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8. The block transfers its power to the rear wheels via an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. That is immediately all that the S Project has in common with its donor car. The intended power is 705 hp, namely more than 200 hp higher than that of the ‘Vette. In addition, the eight-cylinder in the Project S should be able to rotate a maximum of 9,000 rpm, with the sound, according to Bahar, ‘being inspired by the old V10s of Formula 1.’
Plastic surgery
How Ares Design squeezes that extra power from the V8 without the addition of a turbo or supercharger is not entirely clear from the story. The S Project may have the power source of the yet to be announced Corvette Z06. According to Bahar, however, the customer should not get the idea that the S Project is another car under the skin. “We work like a plastic surgeon, changing everything you can see and feel, every button,” he says. “Our goal is that you should have no idea that there is a C8 under the skin.” We do not have any pictures of the interior, but judging by the aggressive appearance of the car in the pictures, that mission has been accomplished. The S Project looks almost like an LMP1 racer for the public road, with the windscreen almost between the front wheels. The roofline is extremely low, while the rear with its continuous LED strip is somewhat like the Bugatti Chiron.
The S Project is the most recent creation by Ares, which previously came up with a reincarnation of the DeTomaso Pantera, among other things. Only 24 copies of the S Project are said to be built, each of which should yield € 500,000. The first episodes should take place by the end of this year. Ares Design also states that other variants of the ‘S’ will follow, including two cheaper versions.