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Czinger 21C VMax: Hypercar Madness or the Future of Driving? A Deep Dive The automotive landscape is witnessing a paradigm shift, a tectonic plate movement driven by innovation, sustainability, and a relentless pursuit of performance. Standing at the vanguard of this revolution is Czinger Vehicles, an avant-garde Southern California company that has burst onto the scene with a hypercar that defies categorization. The 21C VMax is not just a vehicle; it’s a manifesto. It represents a dizzying fusion of cutting-edge technology, radical design, and raw, unadulterated speed that has left us reeling, wondering if we’ve just witnessed the future of hypercars, or simply an audacious act of engineering gone gloriously, terrifyingly mad. The Dawn of a New Era: 3D Printing Meets Hyper-Performance For years, the automotive world has been captivated by the legend of Czinger. The company, under the visionary leadership of founder Kevin Czinger and his son, CEO Lukas Czinger, has been operating in relative stealth, developing a proprietary technology that promises to rewrite the rulebook for how cars are built. This narrative began to unfold publicly in the latter half of 2022 when Lukas Czinger joined our MotorTrend team on The InEVitable podcast. The conversation was a glimpse behind the curtain of a company operating in a domain few have ever seen. The excitement was palpable, and the chance to drive a Czinger 21C VMax on a three-day road rally in California felt less like a test drive and more like an invitation to witness history. Of course, there’s a story to tell on the track. Everyone wants to know what a 1,250-horsepower, seven-figure, 3D-printed hypercar feels like when pushed to its limits. But what about the experience of driving a hybrid hypercar with a center-steer, tandem seating configuration on a 500-mile journey? That’s the question we set out to answer. Factory Fresh: Stepping into the Future The journey began at the heart of this revolutionary operation: the Divergent Technologies factory, the parent company of Czinger. Entering this facility was a stark contrast to any automotive plant I had visited before. It was less a factory and more a fusion of a high-tech laboratory and a futurist art installation. I hadn’t needed a passport to enter a car factory before, but as I was about to discover, the Czinger experience is fundamentally different. Divergent Technologies uses iterative artificial intelligence and massive 3D printers to design and produce mechanical components that are incredibly light and strong. The need for government-issued identification was a consequence of Divergent’s extensive work with the Department of Defense (DOD). While all military hardware was off-limits during my visit, a peek inside one of the massive printers was a truly humbling experience. It felt like I was peering into the future, watching lasers zap powdered aluminum into automotive parts that resembled delicate bird bones. It’s a wild thing to behold. Lukas explained that Divergent’s technology strives to achieve what’s known as the “Pareto Optimal”—the point after which any gram, added or subtracted, becomes a negative in terms of performance. Imagine an engineer needing a bracket to hold the remote reservoir for a rear suspension damper. There is a fixed amount of space, and the part must withstand forces up to a certain magnitude. Using these parameters, the software iterates through hundreds of thousands of design permutations to find the absolute lightest and strongest shape. It’s like the process of evolution accelerated to an impossible speed. Beyond the DOD, nine automotive OEMs are currently using Divergent as a supplier of 3D-printed parts. Aston Martin (DBR22 Roadster), Bugatti (Tourbillon), and McLaren (W1) are the only ones who publicly acknowledge this partnership, though the control arms on the Ferrari F80 certainly look like suspicious candidates. The Carbon Fiber Heart: Decoding the 21C VMax Czinger builds two versions of what is essentially the same car: the high-downforce, track-focused Czinger 21C (named for the 21st century) and the wingless, long-tailed VMax. Technically, the VMax is the Czinger 21C VMax, but the “21C” designation is nowhere to be found on the car itself. For the inaugural Velocity Tour, a 500-mile road rally through Central and Northern California’s wine country, I found myself piloting a sleek silver VMax. The use of the word “piloting” is deliberate. The cabin feels far more like a fighter jet’s canopy than a conventional vehicle’s greenhouse. Indeed, Czinger states that the experience is akin to being in a jet fighter. While I’ve never had the opportunity to sit in the cockpit of a jet, I have had the privilege of riding shotgun in an Extra 330LT stunt plane. There’s a remarkable similarity. In essence, there’s less than a foot of glass on either side of your head. The visibility is astonishing, but the process of entering and exiting the car is nothing short of ridiculous: You sit with your legs facing outward on the massive sill, pull your knees up, and pivot on your backside while tucking your feet into the footwell, then slide your head under the roof. One reason the sills are so massive is that they are packed with batteries. The 21C VMax is a hybrid hypercar, and each sill contains 2.2 kWh of battery power, for a total of 4.4 kWh. The car is not a plug-in hybrid, so a motor powered by the mid-mounted V-8 engine keeps the battery pack charged. These batteries can deliver a staggering 500 horsepower to the front axle, which features a motor for each wheel. The combustion engine is a Czinger-designed 2.9-liter twin-turbo V-8 that produces 750 horsepower on California’s 91-octane premium fuel. If you switch to 100-octane race fuel, the horsepower jumps to 850. The compact but potent engine can also run on ethanol, generating even more power. However, Czinger has not yet released those figures, though we anticipate a 10 percent increase. The gasoline engine drives the rear wheels through an Xtrac single-clutch automated semi-sequential gearbox. This is similar to the Xtrac seven-speed unit that Pagani uses in its Utopia. However, Czinger not only 3D prints the transmission casing but also employs small 48-volt electric motors to execute shifts more quickly at lower speeds. This eliminates the jarring, surge-like behavior that plagues all other automated single-clutch gearboxes at low speeds. The twin-barrel actuators work as advertised in low-speed situations, a fact I was grateful to discover. Maneuvering into gas stations, restaurants, and hotel parking lots felt almost normal. Seriously, bravo, Czinger. The Track Experience: Riding shotgun in the Beast The most unforgettable experience of the rally, however, wasn’t the scenic drives; it was the man sitting behind me for the entire day. As is common practice with many high-end hypercars (such as Bugatti and Pagani), Czinger had a professional driver, Evan Jacobs, accompanying me to ensure I didn’t drive the $2.5 million vehicle off a cliff. Thankfully, later that night, Jacobs assured the Czinger team that I was no threat to the car and that I would be allowed to drive solo for the remainder of the rally. We stopped by Laguna Seca for a few parade laps, but for reasons unknown, non-Czinger employees are not permitted to drive the VMax on racetracks, even at the extremely sedate pace the rally participants were limited to. As I’ve learned the hard way, even if you can’t drive, a ride in such a machine is an experience in itself. I scrambled into the bizarre rear seat. The first thing to understand is that if you have large calves or feet, the rear-seat experience is less than ideal. My XXL calves were literally squeezed between the carbon-fiber tub and the carbon-fiber seat, and my feet didn’t fit well either. However, the visibility through the side glass is incredible. Again, it reminded me of a stunt plane and was a remarkably novel way to experience a racetrack—something I’ve done more than 1,000 times in my career. This was especially true when Jacobs and I convinced the staff at the Skip Barber Racing School (whose track day we crashed) to let him take the VMax for a couple of “6/10ths” hot laps. The most thrilling hot lap I’ve ever experienced was riding shotgun in an Aston Martin Valkyrie LMH race car, where I could feel the blood pooling in my extremities during braking. The Czinger VMax now holds the second spot, and remember, Jacobs wasn’t pushing the car to its limit. Even at a pace significantly below the limit and without the massive rear wing, it was easy to understand how the Czinger 21C achieved what the brand calls the California Gold Rush. This impressive feat saw the car set five production-car track records at Thunder Hill, Sonoma Raceway, Laguna Seca, Willow Springs, and the Thermal Club in the span of five days, driving from one track to the next. Later, Czinger returned to Laguna Seca not only to beat its own record but to reclaim the throne from the track-special Koenigsegg Jesko Sadair’s Spear. That lap time,