A 100-year-old German engineering firm, Capricorn, has unveiled its first-ever hypercar, the Capricorn 01 Zagato. While the name Zagato is quite familiar to the general audience, Capricorn has stayed under the radar. The name may seem a bit innocuous, but this engineering from Germany has a 100-year-old legacy in automotive engineering and design.
Capricorn Automotive, over the years, has played an integral part in a plethora of renowned projects of the automotive world – a few of the projects it was involved in are Bugatti Veyron, Chiron, Bolide, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, and Audi R8. Capricorn has a major role in the field of Motorsports, being involved in world-class championships such as Formula One, DTM, and World Endurance Championship(WEC), further strengthening its resume.
After decades of playing wing man to other notable brands in their pursuit to achieve excellence, Capricorn decided to go Solo and exercise their engineering prowess to build its first-ever in-house project – A 900HP Analogue Hypercar: The Capricorn 01 Zagato.
So, in pursuit of building their Hypercar, Capricorn Automotive called in help from Italy to design the car. Zagato, an Italian design studio known for its decades of excellence in automotive artistry and design, is responsible for the design and aesthetics of the Capricorn 01. Whereas Capricorn focused its abilities on engineering the hypercar.
The Capricorn 01 Zagato is constructed around a full carbon fibre tub, constructed by motorsport-inspired carbon weave to improve structural integrity and stiffness under high load. With the 01 being draped in full carbon fibre, Capricorn claims it only weighs less than 1200kg ( 2645 Pounds), making it lighter than most of its competition.
Snugged amidst the Carbon Fibre tub is a Supercharged 5.2 Litre Ford V8, which, after engineers at Capricorn meddled around with their custom ECU mapping, Exhaust systems, crankshaft, Pistons, and rods, now produces 900HP and 1,000Nm of torque (737lb ft), all of which is being sent to the rear wheels via a gated dogleg manual transmission. Combined, that power figure with a light carbon fibre chassis, the 01 is capable of doing 0-60 Mph in under 3.0 seconds and a claimed top speed of 223Mph.
The 01 design has simple yet elegant lines – borrowing some cues from endurance race cars from the past. And to top it all off, in the age of ostentatious body work, big wings and aerodynamic bits – which makes the design look cluttered and busy – Capricorn and Zagoti went the other route, The 01 has enough aero bits that is absolutely neccesarry infact its the very reason why they opted to keep the horsepower under 900HP, so that it wont have to rely on unnecessary electronic aids and obscure aerodynamics to handle unwanted power, keeping it old school.
In the spirit of keeping it old school and analogue, the interior of the 01 stays fairly simple, a simple steering wheel wrapped in brown leather and carrying two dials to toggle through three different driving modes. No unnecessary buttons and switches to clutter the interior, and more specifically, no overlaying in your face touchscreen infotainment system.
As of now, Capricorn only plans to build 19 units of the 01 Zagato, with each going for upwards of $2.95M. Capricorn Automotive expressed its interest and plans to scale its capacity from 19 units to 100 or even 200 units for future projects.
