GALLO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES, GALLO IMAGES/AFP, MAGAZINE FEATURES, AAI/FOTOSTOCK SA, FACEBOOK/MATE RIMAC
Mate discovered working with a forklift
engine and an old BMW. He found he
had a talent for extracting energy fast.
Others noticed, including an agent
representing a Middle Eastern royal fam-
ily. He showed them some drawings. “I
said, ‘This is the most powerful and ex-
clusive electric vehicle in the world, the
Concept One’.”
At the time, Tesla was building a mas-
sive production line to churn out its cars
at scale. He didn’t even have employees.
“The next day he called me up and said
they wanted to buy two cars. And I said,
‘Great, but there are no “two cars”. The
cars don’t exist.’ And the next day after
that, he called me and he asked, ‘How
much money do you need’?”
That was December 2010. He booked
a slot at the Frankfurt Motor Show the
following year to display a car that didn’t
yet have a single wheel nut.
“I started to convince a few guys I
knew to give up their jobs. And they had
to convince their wives to let them start
work for a 22-year-old guy in a garage to
build a car. It was totally insane.”
How do you begin to gain the expertise
to make each of the thousands of com-
ponents in a car? Yet they had no choice
but to make it all themselves. No one
would sell them so much as a door han-
dle: the car industry produces parts by
the thousand, not singly.
The car they made, entirely from
scratch, would go on to be the Concept
One, the Hammond-scaring beast that
briefly took flight over Switzerland. It
claimed at the time, although there are
competitors to the title, to be the fast-
est-accelerating road car in the world –
offering a 0-90km/h equivalent to that in
a jet fighter. The Concept Two, coming
in 2020, will have a production run in the
low hundreds, each going for a bit more
than £1,5m (R25,5m). It will also reach
90km/h almost a second faster.
“For the new car, the team was 500 in-
stead of 10,” Mate says. “We have a prop-
er budget now, we have investors, we
have funds available to us and we have
the machines to do it properly. There’s
1 000 times more engineering effort.”H
E WORKS weekends, eve-
nings and holidays “When
you do something like this,
you have to simply accept
that you can’t do anything
else in your life.” How does
his girlfriend of 15 years feel about this?e nowsw ats e gotinto
Cars are his first love. I ask how it felt
to watch Hammond crashing his beloved
Concept One – a car that had already
been promised to a customer – onto the
side of a mountain. He opens his com-
puter and searches for a document titled
“Epic F**k-up”. There are 70 slides.
“June 13, 2017,” Marta chips in. “It was
the last day, last race, last lap. He flew off,
he hit the road below, he hit the tele-
phone pole.” The word is overused, but it
really was a miracle he survived. “When
I think things are bad, I think of that and
realise they can get worse.”Mate’s“EpicF**k-up”presentation
doesn’t begin with the crash, though, but
the finances. Or, rather, the fact that, at
the time, they didn’t have any. While
Hammond and his friends were playing,
he was just trying to stay solvent.
“It was a Saturday; we were here in the
company, working. One of my guys called
me and said there was an accident. ‘He’s
alive. The car’s burning.’ And I just... I
didn’t know what to do, what to say. It
was the hardest time of my life. I think it
took 10 years off my life. It’s incredible
that we survived this. It’s incredible.”
Hammond’s colleague Jeremy Clark-
son later said that although Hammond
had accidentally destroyed the car, be-
fore he did – before he soared for 109m
above a Swiss hillside – it had made that
trio of motoring dinosaurs realise elec-
tricity was the future.
“We’re not talking here about a car
that’s as fast as a Lamborghini Aventa-
dor,” gushed Clarkson. “It’s massively
faster than that. It’s faster than anything
else I’ve driven, by a huge, huge margin.”I
T’S difficult to describe what it feels
like to reach 90km/h in 2,5 seconds.
Remember those moments in Star
Wars when they push the button for
lightspeed and, suddenly, the stars
around meld into a line? Alternatively,
imagine the confusion your brain would
feel when suddenly the direction of grav-
ity seems to shift by 90 degrees as you’re
slammed back in your seat.
Mate brakes again as we hurtle around
a small roundabout, to the confusion of
another driver looking to pull out.
“This is very, very different,” he says.
“It’s still very fast.” But the new car he’s
working on is faster. Then he casually
adds, with no apology, the new one also
“has all the global safety crash test certi-
fication and stuff like that”.
Stuff like that. Yes, all that tedious doc-
umentation. Then, a stretch of road
opens up again. Blur. Slam backward to
accelerate. 90km/h. Slam forward again
to brake.
Suddenly I understand what it was
that took Richard Hammond airborne.
This car is a monster. The truth is that
only racing drivers, astronauts and fight-
er pilots are familiar with this kind of ac-
celeration.
It’s all too much for me. The world goes
fuzzy, my cheeks stretch back and I gig-
gle. S
©THE TIMES MAGAZINE/NEWSLICENSINGTOP: Mate with his longtime girlfriend,
Katarina Lovrić. ABOVE: When he was a
schoolboy he invented this hi-tech glove
as an alternative to the computer key-
board. BELOW: Even as a young kid he
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