Looks like things are falling into place at Czinger. First Jethro dropped a lot of info about the imminent production status of 21C in this
Road & Track article from two weeks ago.
Here's some of the most interesting bits:
The 21C is fully homologated to demonstrate the mass-production potential of the technology. The likes of Aston Martin and McLaren use the “show and display” loophole to make their most extreme cars available to U.S. customers, but it’s a point of pride that the 21C tackles safety and emissions requirements head-on.
Lotus Engineering is currently working on final emissions testing in the U.K., and chassis development work is drawing to a close at a private testing facility near California City. Customer cars are just weeks away from our visit, and Czinger is determined that lap records will follow. Laguna Seca, COTA, maybe even the Nürburgring. “Dominating Performance” is the mantra around here.
Today, sadly, we won’t hear or feel the 21C at full attack. Not even close. The V Max pictured here is a prototype, and with final production vehicles coming in weeks, Czinger doesn’t want us to experience a car without representative engine and gearbox calibration.
Even this extremely confident father-and-son duo admits that developing a radical hypercar has not been all smooth sailing. “Doing an engine yourself is a big undertaking. If you look at the blue car [another validation vehicle], we thought we were pretty close,” Lukas says. “Now? I think every single part number has changed. And that was partially the cycle, right? And it’s like when we get something wrong, per se—we get our crash result, we get our engine readout from the dyno—we go back to the drawing board on the design side. We make that design change, and within 48 hours, I can have a new part. I’m going to be back on that dyno. That’s magnitudes faster than typical automotive. So, we are doing things fundamentally different. But we’ve also just had the cheat code of being able to iterate that much faster.”
The skeptic in me has to ask: Will this hypercar ever actually deliver? Kevin looks me dead in the eye and measures his reply carefully. “As the actual people that own and control the company and call it Czinger, yes,” he says. “We will absolutely do that. This car is going to be an actual durable street-legal car. We will, with every particle of our being, make sure of that. America needs a kick-ass real performance company, and with a small team and these super tools, we will deliver.”
They also touched upon weight of the car:
Initial targets projected a dry weight of about 2760 pounds (1,250 kg), but the final production-spec car is closer to 3200 (1,450 kg).
I always knew 1,250 kg dry weight was too good to be true [Back in 2021,
Motor Trend reported that the curb weight is 2,900 lb (1,315 kg) - I assumed that's a wet weight without fuel, rather than true curb].
Now this new number blows past that by 200 kg and it's still only a dry weight (unless Jethro mismatched standards). Whether it's reasonable to assume the difference between dry and wet, based on the previous reporting, is 65 kg, and therefore a production 21C is 1,515 kg, I leave up to you.
While we're on the topic of weight, let me interject and mention the weight of the chassis. Because Czinger had this info panel at their Goodwood FoS stand:
It gives us a weight figure of the "Bio-Logic" chassis: 281 lb (127.5 kg)
and a torsional stiffness: 22,125 ft-lb (30,000 Nm) per degree.
If that weight is really of the entire chassis, including the subframe bits and crash structures, then hats off to them. But I suspect it's rather the monocoque alone. So I'm just gonna call that a misleading wording by Czinger.
Finally, Czinger put up links to couple of unlisted videos on their
linktree page. They all sit at single digit views.
This is the most interesting one, because it shows crash test footage of both the standard car and the V Max version.
This one shows the date of the test: June-24 2024
They also claim that:
The chassis is about 25% lighter than the latest state of the art thin wall casting and composite architectures in the industry today.
