F1 hero Emerson Fittipaldi on starting a supercar company

Emerson Fittipaldi won two Formula 1 World Championships. He won the Indy 500. But, aged 70, he isn’t sitting back and watching YouTube videos of all his successes. Instead, 22 years after retiring from motorsport, he’s starting his own supercar company.

A concept was revealed at this year’s Geneva Motor Show. The EF7 Vision Gran Turismo is a two-seater supercar with a 600bhp 4.8-litre V8 engine. Emerson says it will launch the Fittipaldi Motors brand, initially with a 25-car run of EF7 track day cars. The first models will be built next spring: it’s full steam ahead.

The concept was developed by Pininfarina and the production car is being engineered by the Italian company and a German racing team called HWA. Emerson himself made the link, around a year ago and says “this is the dream team: Italian design and German engineering”. Oh, and plenty of backing from investors, led by a Miami-based ‘impact investment’ fund called Dakia Global.

Upon Emerson’s insistence, the EF7 has an aggressive shark nose style, with lots of motorsport-influenced vents and spoilers. Plenty of tech that HWA, which runs the Mercedes-AMG team in DTM German touring cars, will now tune into a production-ready state.

No less than HWA’s overall head of race car development, a man called Hubert Hugle, is now hard at work to get a running prototype EF7 ready by August. This will be a significant milestone in a project that started in November 2015. The pressure is on: a 27-month timeframe is tight in the supercar world.

Emerson is keen for it to be as light as possible – he’s given Hugle a 1000kg kerbweight target. “I am used to driving single-seater racing cars,” he says. “Every time I drive a GT car, I always feel the momentum and the weight.” He doesn’t want this for his own GT car.

However, he’s not going to assume everyone is as talented as he is. “We want a very forgiving car with some movement, so it will give the driver some information. It is not 100% a racing car, but a car with which to have fun on the track.”

It sounds like the V8 engine will be a key part of this. In illustrations, and to Emerson’s clear delight, it looks not unlike the Cosworth DFV V8 that powered him to two World Championships in 1972 and 1974. There will be a bespoke gearbox, to which suspension will be directly mounted, like in a racing car. No subframes here: too heavy.

It’s going to be roomy inside, even for taller drivers, and very safe – Emerson, who survived a dramatic crash late in his career, is insisting on this. Side impacts are something he’s particularly focused on. That’s why the central carbon fibre tub is slightly oversized compared to the supercar norm.

Will this fascinating project succeed? Time will tell. But there’s no doubting the enthusiasm of the former racer it’s named after. He conquered motorsport for decades: can Emerson Fittipaldi now produce a winning supercar too?