Articles about Spyker

[amzamz]

... that happened back in 2009 apparently.

[amzamz]

... nice Chinese article. With photos of the all black Spyder. Interestingly, it appears to have no aircon, despite of the Lotus steering wheel and the wide body. Or, are the photos of different cars? (source) Looks like this car is for sale. The sign in the back says "used luxury cars".

[SpykerOwner]

... The sign in the back says "used luxury cars".

Hardly used I would say. Even the protective film is still on the gear stick.

[Reddingius]

@ Amzamz: It must be one of the first wide-bodied cars as it still has the old-style headlights. I've only seen that in the TT prototype. Maybe the widebody was retrofit.

[amzamz]

... oh, so true! And right on the spot:

First drive: 2006 Spyker C8 Spyder - Won't go unoticed
by David Booth

Imagine you’re in love with old-time motoring. You know, the kind that balding curmudgeons claim was ruined by power steering, hydraulically assisted brakes and, God forbid, electronic driving safety aids. Real seat-of-the-pants stuff where you can feel every crease in the road. Tail-wagging oversteer that isn’t automatically throttled by some overly ambitious digital safety nanny looking to save the world from itself. And, perhaps most of all, a car that hasn’t become so plebian — like the Lamborghini Gallardo — that you meet its duplicate at almost every downtown stoplight.

Money’s not a problem, so you can afford anything internally combusting that the planet has to offer. You’d shop for some classic sports car, only experience has made you that much wiser and you’re loath to suffer from automotivi interruptus, that horrible ache in the pit of your stomach as you reach for your cellphone because the damned Jaguar D-Type, Aston DB4 or Ferrari 330 GTC blew its magneto, carburetor, bearings or whatever the heck it is that your mechanic is going to bill you $10,000 for fixing this time.

Besides, would it be too much to ask for a few creature comforts, like a seat that coddles or even working air conditioning?

Has Spyker got a car for you. Or two. Maybe even three. Haven’t heard of Spyker? Not many people have, a not unsurprising state of affairs considering the Dutch company has sold only 253 cars since it opened its doors in 2001. That’s not to say Spyker is without lineage. It originally started building horse-drawn carriages in the 1880s. It was the first to build a six-cylinder, four-wheel-drive car and, along the way, joined forces with an aircraft manufacturer. Resurrected by wealthy Dutch entrepreneur Victor Muller in 1999, the company now has three hand-built models — the C8 Spyder convertible, a hard-top version called the Laviolette and the all-new Aileron coupe.

The Spyder was the first of the species. In fact, my tester was a 2006 model with more than 24,000 hard kilometres on it. The first impression of the Spyder is one of impeccable craftsmanship worthy of an obsessive Germanic machinist. My next thought was that it’s obvious whoever penned the exterior styling suffered an obsession with being noticed.

The exterior has scoops, intakes and aerodynamic lips — all beautifully sculpted in polished aluminum — seemingly everywhere, gorgeous twin pipes that exit through, not under, the rear bodywork and the kind of exhaust note usually reserved for the drag strip. The Spyker is an extrovert’s car in every way.

That’s nothing compared with the interior, which boasts deeply quilted leather (often seen in truly outlandish hues), toggle switches for every possible electronic function and an acreage of milled aluminum not seen since Bentley was an independent automaker. The coup de grâce is a shift linkage that looks like a high-tech version of the articulated linkages found in aircraft of yore. I’m not sure it makes shifting any more precise, but it is part and parcel of an interior package that is completely unlike anything else in the automotive industry.

But there’s far more to the C8 than just outrageous looks. For one thing, it boasts an all-aluminum space frame not unlike that that renders the Audi R8 so robust. So rigid is the Spyker’s basic undercarriage that, in hardtop Laviolette form, it requires an amazing 18,840 pound-feet of torque to deflect the chassis one degree (that, dear friends, is a stoutness equal to anything from the big boys).

Suspension-wise, the Spyder (and Laviolette) owe much to open-wheel racers, all four corners being cushioned by double wishbones controlled by inboard, rocker arm-actuated Koni shocks. It makes for wonderfully communicative handling.

Despite having the Audi-sourced engine situated fairly far rearward in the framework, the C8 steers neutrally thanks to a rear track wider than the front and asymmetrical 19-inch tires (265 millimetres wide in the rear and 235 mm in the front). Without a race track to test its outer limits, there’s no way of knowing whether the C8 outhandles a Porsche, Ferrari or even a Corvette. But this much can be said: The steering is almost perfectly linear despite its lack of power boost, and stability at any speed is truly amazing for a car this short and light (about 1,250 kilograms for the Spyder, a slightly heavier 1,275 kg for the Laviolette). That’s all fortuitous because the Spyker has not a hint of the electronic driving aids that burden most modern supercars; the basic chassis absolutely needs to be controllable. Perhaps even more amazing is that the racing-derived suspension hasn’t resulted in a bone-jarring ride. I can think of all manner of mass-produced sports cars with far worse damping.

I am less enthused with Spyker’s decision to provide no power boost for the Spyder’s brakes. I get that it’s all part of the company’s purist image, but despite the use of humongous, six-piston AP Racing front brakes and 356-mm discs, the brake pedal still requires serious quadriceps work to get maximum power. Considering the Spyder’s price tag limits the clientele to the aged (if not quite yet infirm), requiring this much fitness from its owners might be a sales limitation.

A huge part of the C8’s everyday practicality stems from Spyker’s sourcing of its engines from Audi. Originally seen in the previous-generation S4, the 4.2-litre V8 in both the Spyder and the Laviolette has been boosted to 400 horsepower thanks to Spyker’s own intake and exhaust plumbing as well as judicious remapping of the fuel injection and ignition mapping.

Nonetheless, one doesn’t buy a Spyker for its straight-line speed. Any number of sports cars — many costing much less — can out-accelerate the Dutch demon. But the high-revving Audi mill provides what purists would call adequate power.

Remember my opening gambit about that old-time, non-electronically assisted steering? Virtually anything with more power than this would require any number of digital monitors to make it drivable, ruining that whole visceral, I’m-completely-in-charge-here feeling. Besides, any car that can spring to 100 kilometres an hour in just 4.5 seconds and top out at 300 km/h cannot possibly be found lacking.

(source)

[IVR007]

That man can write.

Definitely captured the essence!

[F Spider]

Nice

[SpykerOwner]

Great write up. Makes me want to drive a Spyker C8 immediately

[amzamz]

... article on a recent visit of PKM members to Zeewolde. Dutch. (source)

[amzamz]

... short feature pulished in 2005. (source) Comparison of a Spyker to a Bugatti racer.

[IVR007]

A new article from Autocar: autocar.co.uk - How Victor Muller plans to revive Spyker

[amzamz]

... a comparison of the two companies Marussia and Spyker. (source, русский)

[amzamz]

... Russian article from August 2012, comparing a Porsche, a Mercedes and a Spyker. See here.

[amzamz]

For the tenacious Spyker, no impassable roads
Victor Muller looks past Saab and toward the future of his beloved Spyker

By: Blake Z. Rong on 6/02/2014

Spyker CEO Victor Muller was late. He was stuck in traffic, and while his car slowly wound its way up to Midtown we were at a hotel bar on 54th Street drinking tea and Peroni with John Walton, a soft-spoken Brit with a wide face and the build of a bulldog.

Walton, the Number Two in Spyker's regime, is the man Muller trusts more than anyone else. Friend, confidant and co-sharer in this Spyker dream, Walton -- who hails from England but now lives in Boston -- joined Muller after 16 years with Aston Martin. When he started at Aston in 1993, the firm was selling 22 Virages a year.

"One of the things that I'd always said to Victor was, 'look, if this company wants to get truly successful, globally, you have to have more than a supercar. You have to have more volume in there,'" said Walton. "And to have an entry-level car with a price point at around 140 to 150 thousand dollars, gives you a much larger playing field."

At Aston Martin Walton helped the company develop almost every car in its contemporary lineup. The DB7. The DB9. Subsequently, the DBS. The V8 Vantage, Aston Martin's foray into "volume." The flagship Vanquish. The first one? "The only one," he winked.

Muller first met Walton at the Geneva Motor Show in 1997, when Muller bought the first DB7. They immediately hit it off. Muller loved his DB7, but was unimpressed by the interior: "Why do you guys have plastic switches?" he had asked, Walton recounted. "Where's the bespoke nature gone? Why isn't everything carved in marble?" Years later, when Spyker built its first car, the C8 -- with its aluminum-knurled switches, its exposed gear linkage, an engine-turned dashboard the full width of the cockpit, and diamond-stitched leather that blanketed even the doorsills -- Walton took a look inside and said, "OK, you've taken over where Aston left off."

The two kept in touch over the years, attending the same auto shows and traveling in the same circles. Muller brought Walton on board in 2012 -- a time when Spyker had been briefly put on hold while Saab's, and subsequently Muller's, world collapsed.

Ah yes, Saab. Walton cautioned me, before Muller arrived, not to dwell on it. "A huge distraction," Walton put it with understatement. "It was damn close to taking down Spyker." One gets the sense that it had been personal for Muller, this hideous Goliath undertaking that seemed, almost, to make no sense.

When Muller finally did arrive he walked down some slight marble stairs past circular wine racks to find our table, tucked away in the corner. He apologized for his lateness, taking off a rain-soaked coat and colorful cable-knit scarf, and took a seat next to Walton -- he seemed relaxed, unfazed by both the traffic and the weather. Walton ordered a second Peroni.

"We were just talking about Saab," said Walton, to Muller's visible chagrin.

He couldn't help but describe the experience in Biblical terms. "It was hell on Earth," he said, taking care to emphasize every word. "The years 2010 and 2011 can only be described as hell on earth. Dante's Inferno. I gave everything humanly possible to try and save my company. And I think a little bit more than that. And I almost killed myself in the process. It was hell."

When the company went down on December 17th, 2011, one week before Christmas, Muller found himself at home with a lot of questions to ask himself -- about Saab and about Spyker. "Is this really what I want?"

He was 160 million Euros in debt with a company that had just ceased to exist, money he owed both General Motors and the Swedish government. By 2012, Saab Automobile would be $2 billion in the red. GM was blocking a move by Chinese-based Youngman to invest in both Spyker and Saab. At that time, Spyker had survived just 12 years. It was "a reasonable assumption" to believe that Spyker would not make it to 13, an assumption that almost everybody had all but concluded. The lid slammed shut for Muller.

And then, two weeks later, when he'd gotten some sleep and started to think more clearly, he decided -- hell no, he wouldn't let the company that he built with his bare hands go down.

"My beautiful company," emphasized Muller. "Hell no."

The Spyker design template was set in 1999 when Muller co-founded Spyker with young engineer Maarten de Bruijn. That year, de Bruijn shocked his fellow Europeans when he introduced an Audi V8-powered coupe called the Silvestris, a car he had been building for the better part of nine years. 265 horsepower, 2,000 pounds, the ungainly stump of a car might be forgiven for looking like it was built in a shed, because it was. Nonetheless, the performance potential caught Muller's eye. Imagine that, the two must have said: the return of Spyker! Two years later, the Silvestris -- whose name means, literally, "from the forest" -- laid down the design elements for the C8 Laviolette, a car that reflects how a form can evolve into something truly beautiful when a few million Euros are thrown at it.

The two settled into an easygoing partnership. Muller the entrepreneur, de Bruijn the metalworker. For de Bruijn, Muller was the benefactor who helped him leave his parents' house, literally; a "motivator, speaker and smooth-talker," de Bruijn told NRC Handelsblad in 2010. Clearly, Muller hasn't changed much.

But when Muller wanted to take Spyker public in 2005, de Bruijn balked: "Victor likes to think big and conceptually," he said. "He likes glamour. I was neither willing nor able to work like that." De Bruijn left the company that year, citing "a difference in opinion." (Muller, at the time, dismissed the rumors of his departure as "nonsense;" he never brought up his name in conversation.) Maarten de Bruijn now builds speedboats, gorgeous lightweight vessels with 560-horsepower marine V8s and aluminum hulls that resemble shards of splintered ice. The name of his company? Silvestris.

Since the C8, Spyker has dazzled enthusiasts worldwide but not its investors. Its Spyker Squadron faced Porsches at Le Mans but never quite beat them -- its best result was in 2009, where placed 5th in the GT2 class. The F1 foray nearly destroyed the company. The Saab fiasco ticked off seemingly every newspaper editor in Sweden. The C8 Laviolette got a role with Sharon Stone, who does something suggestive in it, then crashes it.

Recently, though, Spyker has begun to refocus. It was at The Quail at Carmel Valley Ranch during the week leading up to the 2013 Pebble Beach Concours D'Elegance -- five months after the B6 Venator Coupe's first Geneva unveiling, where the world glimpsed the Spyker B6 Venator Spyder for the first time.

It is a fetching little car -- about the wheelbase of a Mazda Miata, with impossibly dramatic curves that overshadow its size. That character line conducts itself with dignity until it dips across the door, with a bout of sincere exaggeration. The headlights are stretched to kabuki paint lengths, as if pulled back by speed itself. The interior's layout is a bit plain but the detailing is, again, pure Spyker -- its starkly upright and tombstone-like center console is engine-turned, the gear lever is again braced with chrome poles (now far less complicated in automatic guise), and even the twin humps behind the seats are covered in diamond-stitched leather. Unlike Spykers past, there is refreshingly little chrome jeweling on the outside -- with the exception of "Nulla tenaci invia est via" emblazoned on the very same humps, clearly a spot of concept-car self-indulgence: it is Spyker's motto, rendered in Latin, a shot across the bow of the supercar world: "For the tenacious, no road is impassable."

Muller, wearing a cotton Spyker Formula One jacket, beamed when the car finally rolled onto the Concept Lawn. He penned the design himself. "I don't like, at all, this angular design," he said, glancing briefly at the outrageously pinpricked Lamborghini Veneno. "A car has to be natural. People in general, I think, like the look of things that have organic shapes." The color is one he calls "Hunter Red," modeled after the vibrant bougainvillea around Muller's home in Majorca, Spain, where the Mediterranean climate reminds him of a California summer. It's a brave color to use, a color that's equal parts garish, confident and polarizing.

"I would never claim to be a car designer, I just design my own cars," claimed Muller. "But I'm not an educated car designer."

Muller hasn't missed a Pebble Beach since 1991, back when it was "a nice, cozy, intimate thing." During the 1990s, Muller made a small fortune co-owning the Dutch fashion house McGregor -- which, if nothing else, enabled him to add 50 cars to his personal collection.

"Today, I am much more sensible," he said. "I have 15." He kept such luminaries as a Lancia Aurelia B20 GT, a Rolls-Royce Phantom II Continental Drophead Sedanca Coupe -- one of eight made, he claims -- and a 1963 Lancia Familia convertible -- his first car, bought when he turned 18. It also includes a Ferrari 360 which Muller employed as a benchmark for the Spyker C8.

Debuting the Venator here meant that Muller got a chance to meet current and potential owners. "Crazy. People begging to place orders. All the owners that came by yesterday wanted to buy one. People have been very, very kind," reassured Muller, then with self-depreciation, added, "they could be more critical. They have been."

The self-selecting audience means Muller gets to play tastemaker. "Our customers don't want loud colors. They want soft tones, silvers. In all our years, we sold one car in red. That says it all. With 280 Spykers currently running around, the new generation of Spyker owners will not order that car in bright red. Nothing wrong with bright red, it's just not where Spyker sits."

70 percent of the 270 people around the world that have purchased Spykers still own them. Many have two. A Russian man specified two Spykers far off the options list, diving deep into the details on each car. Muller must have loved this guy. "They're rare," said Muller. Then, he grinned. "Sometimes, they surprise me with extremely good taste."

Since Pebble, the most exciting piece of news for Spyker has been the Venator bond, the chance for potential owners to invest directly into the company. If Spyker goes public in 4 years -- to de Bruijn's chagrin, no doubt -- an early adopter will be able to convert their bond into equity. The bond costs $158,000. It will mature for three years at 7.5%, at which point it will be worth $207,000 in cash -- or, the price of a B6 Venator Bond Edition, a limited edition that comes with its own Chronoswiss wristwatch: 100 cars, 100 bonds.

Needless to say, no car company has ever tried this before.

"Within a matter of 24 hours we've had 30 expressions of interest," said Muller over the phone this past March, when the program was introduced. "And that is way above what we've expected."

Muller and Walton will talk endlessly about Spyker's grand plans: Experience Centers across the country, to take Spyker away from the dusty back corners of exotics superstores. "If you're in Manhattan and you want to see a Spyker, we'll make it happen. If you're going to the Hamptons and you want to take it for a test drive, we'll make it happen," said Walton. Mechanics, flown in last-minute from Zeewolde at fantastic expense, should something go wrong. Bespoke car buying more akin to purchasing a Hermes bag than a Lamborghini -- or, ironically, a modern Aston Martin. This is, after all, the company that once gave a private webcam to buyers allowing them to watch their cars being built, and even the personal phone numbers of the line workers.

Forty Spyker C8 Ailerons will be built this year, covering over half of the 70 cars on the waitlist. The D8 Peking-to-Paris SUV, from the 2006 Geneva Auto Show, is still happening. "Everybody says, 'are you guys ever gonna build that really cool SUV?'" said Muller. "Yeah, we are."

And the Venator will be production by the end of this year. Preproduction examples are currently being assembled. But in true Muller fashion, there's an air of mystery -- or shadiness, depending on your perspective -- about it all. Recently, a letter to current Spyker owners suggested that the Venator will be powered by the same engine used in the wonderful Lotus Evora -- a 3.5-liter, 345-hp, 295 lb-ft supercharged V6 from Toyota and tuned by Lotus. (This, in fact, is 30 horsepower down from Spyker's original estimate in Geneva; perhaps some additional tuning will make up the difference.) Whether the Venator's chassis was also developed by Lotus remains to be seen. "We will not build them in our own facilities," said Muller. "We can't say which one, but it will be a large one.

"There's a lot being finalized right now. I'm not at liberty to give details."

An exchange in the corner of our hotel bar Muller and Walton inadvertently crystallize the energy that's driven Spyker from the start.

"Next year it's 100 years of the propeller logo, actually," Muller mentioned off-handedly. "We should celebrate that."

Walton paused. "Oh my good Lord."

"Yeah."

"That is really cool, I didn't think it was -- I hadn't -- "

"2014 is 100 years of the Zeewolde logo. We should have a Zeewolde party."

We'll only invite tenacious people," Walton suggested.

"People that have conquered Everest," said Muller. "Walked barefoot to the South Pole."

"Oh! The guy that landed the plane on the Hudson River!" Walton was giddy. "I want to meet that guy."

"That's a great plan, by the way," Muller said. "The most tenacious people in the world, getting together for a 100-year party. How cool would that be, right? The birth of a great plan. That is something we need to do."

"Let's go write the list of invitees right now," said Walton.

... nice interview! And NEWS!!! (source)

[IVR007]

Nice write-up!