James Glickenhaus is under no illusions about what he's doing with his race car business. "If you want to go racing, or start a car company," he told The Drive in July, "you basically take a real serious accounting of all your capital, and you figure your age and your life expectancy, and you figure you just need to have enough to eat by the time you die. And that's how much you can spend, because you're going to lose it all."
Well, if you're going to lose it all, you might as well do so in style. Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus has made a name for itself in endurance racing, taking numerous class wins in the 24 Hours of Nurburgring with its insanely lightweight SCG003C. Unsatisfied with that degree of equipment torture, Glickenhaus is also gearing up for a run at the punishing Baja 1000, with an SCG Boot that updates the design of the Baja Boot Steve McQueen used to race. You might call it a Baja Reboot. It looks absolutely nuts.
But today there's more – Glickenhaus's pile of family and film production money (remember 1990's Frankenhooker?) has not yet started drying up. And he's got his eye on Le Mans.
The new Hypercar class becomes the premier racing class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans from 2020/21, and allows for hypercar-style prototypes or race cars developed from exotic street cars that sell at least 20 units. Horsepower is limited to 750, and a lower weight limit has been set at 1,100 kg (2,425 lb), but the cars may or may not include hybrid and recuperative systems. Check out the regulations here.
The renders we see today will become SCG's Le Mans racer. It's called the SCG007 and it will use a 3-liter, twin-turbo V6 engine – perhaps, some are speculating, the Ferrari-derived donk from the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, which makes around 500-odd horses as is. Glickenhaus says it'll be a hybrid, with drive to all four wheels – although as yet, only in the comments on an Instagram post.
The SCG007 continues the company's love for super-aerodynamic body styling, with huge splitters and side wings, giant channels drawing pressure out from behind the front wheel wells, a rounded cabin that allows air to separate around the sides as well as flow over the top, and generous hip scoops that will pre-pressurize air at speed before it goes into the turbos.
The rear wing is enormous, positioned up in the airstream and kept well out of the way of the gently sloping rear engine cover. Four central exhausts interrupt a serious-looking rear diffuser setup, and the front end gets plenty of attention too, including hood venting, a shapely splitter and a set of side "flicks" similar to what Ferrari used on its wild FXX-K Evo, which the company described as an "aerodynamics laboratory on wheels."
It's a stunner of a car – and will certainly be right at home among the other LMP1 Hypercars, which will definitely include Aston Martin's awesome Valkyrie and something from Toyota, possibly based on the Gazoo Racing Super Sport Concept it took to Le Mans last year.
It will be anything but "right at home" on the road, where the SCG007 will stand out like a prominent set of dog's danglies and offer a level of practicality and comfort you could probably match by scrunching yourself into a shopping trolley and rolling it down a hill. Glickenhaus figures this will be part of the attraction for the 20-or-more souls who will fork out in excess of a million dollars each for what must be one of the most stripped-back and extreme race cars ever to have mirrors and license plates slapped on them.
SCG's street cars don't have to adhere to a ton of the safety standards other manufacturers need to work with. Glickenhaus played a very crafty move to achieve this, taking advantage of the chaos when Donald Trump fired the head of the National Transport and Safety Authority after becoming president. SCG's perfectly-timed application to become a low volume manufacturer sat unopened on a desk in some bureaucratic dungeon for more than 90 days, which under certain federal loopholes (now closed) made the government's silence a legal acceptance of the application.
So, the SCG007 will have no airbags and will undergo no crash testing, and will be exempt from most federal safety standards. It'll have stickers on the dash saying "drive this thing on the road at your own risk." It will be an absolute savage of a production street car.
Glickenhaus is hell-bent on putting the Stars and Stripes back in the faces of the European competition at Le Mans. This racing project will be insanely expensive, and there's little chance he'll come close to recouping the tens of millions it'll cost through the sales of SCG007 street cars. But here's a fella completely obsessed with racing, with the money and chutzpah to play in the deep end, living his best life somewhere between smashing through Baja dunes and grueling 24-hour hypercar endurance races. You've got to admire the life this madman has built for himself.
Source: Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus
