British sports car builder Ginetta announces 600-horsepower supercar

Often when a small car company announces a high-end supercar, it feels like just another maker to add to the list of expensive sports cars that might even end up as vaporware. But British builder Ginetta shouldn't be written off too quickly. The company has been building sports cars since 1958, and some of its old cars even appeared in Gran Turismo 4. More important, Ginetta still builds sports cars from low-powered street-legal coupes to full-on protoype-style track cars. It even runs one-make series for some of its cars.

Now that we've established Ginetta is a name to be taken seriously, what is this supercar it's going to build? Well it doesn't have a name, but it does have some basic specifications. It will have a 600-horsepower naturally aspirated V8, and the car itself will be made of carbon fiber. The engine will be coupled to a race car-derived sequential manual transmission. The teaser image shows a coupe that probably has a front-engine layout, and the styling looks like a combination of a C7 Corvette and 2020 Toyota Supra.

We can make a few other inferences about the car based on other Ginetta cars. The engine is probably a version of the aluminum-block 6.2-liter V8 used in the G58 prototype race car. It makes 575 horsepower in that application. Ginetta also specializes in making cars light. Its heaviest cars right now are the G55 coupes at 2,392 pounds. The V8-powered G58 actually weighs less at 2,072 pounds, so we suspect the unnamed supercar will slot between the two, or weigh just a little bit more than the G55 in the worst-case scenario. Ginetta hasn't given a date for when more information will come out, but there's a chance we could see more at the Geneva Motor Show, since it's a favorite for supercar manufacturers.