Expensive to buy, almost as exciting to look at as they are to drive, and, in Britain, at least, hugely impractical, speedsters are the current supercar fad.
They take their inspiration from racing cars of the 1950s and 1960s, machines like the Porsche 550 RS, original Ferrari Testarossa and Aston Martin DBR3S, and the key features are the absence of a roof, windows and windscreen.
Ferrari, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and McLaren all currently offer, or have recently offered, customers a speedster, for which they’ll charge you up to £2m. But despite its Mercedes-McLaren SLR Stirling Moss reigniting the interest in screen-free supercars back in 2009, Mercedes doesn’t have one in its lineup.
Enter German product designer Roland A. Bussink, who has drawn from both the SLR Stirling Moss and current Mercedes’ F1 cars to create his own from the Mercedes-AMG GT R Roadster.
Unlike the Ferrari Monza and McLaren Elva, which all feature bespoke bodywork, the Bussink GT R SpeedLegend looks much like a conventional GT R Roadster from the waist down.
But from there up, it’s a radically different beast, and not just because the windscreen is a tenth of the height it would normally be. No, the real talking point is the carbon fibre Speedbow, which looks like the protective ‘halo’ used on modern F1 cars, and stretches from the base of the windscreen to the roll hoops behind the seats.
Bussink claims its speedster weighs 100kg less than a standard GT R Roadster, which would improve both the power to weight ratio and centre of gravity even if it had left the AMG’s 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 alone. But it’s gone ahead and wound it up from 577 to 850bhp just for good measure.
Just five examples of the SpeedLegend will be built at Bussink’s German base, and while it’s not clear how much they cost, whatever the price is, it hasn’t deterred buyers from snapping up all five.
Keyword: Mercedes-AMG doesn’t make a GT R Speedster, so Bussink built one instead