Yahoo Autos Oilstainlab HF-11 Is a $2.35 Million Hypercar Made by and for Maniacs
In 2019, brothers Nikita and Iliya Bridan formed Oilstainlab with the goal of creating a unique supercar.
The HF-11 will be the company's first foray into production cars.
A total of 25 cars are planned, each priced at $2,350,000 (although you can save $500K by going internal combustion only).
CORRECTION 10/11/2024: This story originally mentioned that the composites company building the Oilstainlab tubs also did the tubs for the Ford GT, but in fact the company is not partnered with Multimatic or Ford. We have corrected the text below.
Nikita and Iliya Bridan are twins. Both are designers and between them have spent time at Acura, Cadillac, Genesis, Honda, and Toyota, but in 2019, they decided it was time to create their own supercar company.
All modern car companies claim to be disrupters. But Oilstainlab makes things that truly bring the party to a record-scratch stop, with one-off builds that look like unfinished Le Mans prototypes from the '60s: cars like the Half11, a mashup of vintage Can-Am racer and elementary-school fantasy doodle.
Oilstainlab brought the Half11 to Goodwood, and would-be customers took notice. "People started reaching out and being like, 'Hey, can we buy one?' So about three years ago we started thinking about how we could make a product that people actually want to buy," Nikita Bridan says.
To call the next step of Oilstainlab's work a production car is stretching the limit of that definition a little, but the brothers are putting together a team, have a design in process, and have ambitious plans to release a running prototype of their new HF-11 in spring 2025, and from there they'll move to building 25 customer cars.
Target Weight: 2000 Pounds
The HF-11 will be a rear-wheel-drive, mid-engine machine with a custom carbon-fiber tub built by a composites factory in Canada. Composite body panels should help the team achieve a target weight of 2000 pounds, although Nikita admits he'd accept more weight if he could find a craftsperson who could hammer out 25 sets of aluminum bodywork. "That's the dream," he says. "A handmade aluminum body."
Subframes made of Docol R8 high-strength steel will support tubular suspension components and adjustable Ohlins dampers. The race version will ride on 18-inch wheels, but the street versions are set for 19- and 20-inchers. Designwise, the front end looks like a chopped and smoothed Porsche 911, coupled with a rear that has more than a hint of Jaguar F-type if its underside were left open, like the lower half of a Dutch door. It looks poised to attack, consume your face, and then lunge off, cackling, in the direction of its next victim.
"Cars have become really fussy. They're really busy, and proportions have sort of stagnated and become very commonplace," Nikita Bridan says. "So we tried to push the proportions to something that's unique."
Both EV and ICE
It's the powertrain setup that's the most unusual. The brothers are working with an engine manufacturer on a 650-hp 4.5-liter flat-six (which Nikita says is not based on a Porsche case) that will rev to 12,000 rpm and be backed by a manual transmission. So far so good; that's not that weird. But because Oilstainlab customers have expressed interest in both ICE and EV propulsion, Nikita says the HF-11 will come with one of each: the 650-hp six-cylinder and an 860-hp electric motor and battery pack that revs to 13,000 rpm and can be swapped out in the customer's garage, depending on their mood.
"I know! It seems insane," says Nikita when this is questioned. "It seems like a terrible idea on the face of it, which is kind of what we always do. But battery technology that's out there these days enables a packaging envelope that is very similar to a combustion engine with a gas tank. And the weight is even similar. We can split the rear subframe off the carbon tub. It's not really a powertrain swap, it's a subframe swap. One of my crazy childhood memories was Audi swapping an entire rear subframe out at Le Mans in 2000, and they did it in four minutes."
Both the gas and the electric units will be included in the price of $2,350,000, although if you want the gas-only version, you can deduct $500,000.
"There's a huge battle right now, obviously, between combustion and EV. EV is trying to prove combustion sucks. Combustion is trying to hold on and remain relevant. So our approach is to offer both," he says.
Wanted: 11 Maniacs
Another innovative practice the brothers are implementing is to invite a group of clients, all of whom will have signed on to purchase the car, to become party to the process of tuning and finalization. These people—who self-select as those who already own competitive hypercars—are given a cheeky moniker: Maniacs.
"Our goal right now is to find the 11 maniacs that'll be part of our development program," Nikita says. "We've got six that we're pretty sure want to be part of it. And then we're hopeful that, once the car has been shown, we'll be able to find the other five." He pauses. "I mean, we're kind of building a family here in many ways. We're only going to build 25 cars. We don't want dickheads to be part of the family."
Nikita says the goal of Oilstainlab isn't to become a major OEM or even to keep making high-end supercars but simply to keep a certain kind of driving experience alive. "We come from the OEM industry, and the big manufacturers are now handcuffed with regulations and legislation. They're unable to build the cars that we really want, which are lightweight and engaging. We just want to build the cars that no one else is building, for the true enthusiast."
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