The Billionaire Boys Club

Somewhere in the deep lying recesses of your mind where there are no bound­aries to things and no constraints to your indul­gence you drive a Spyker. The cars made by the Dutch company, which was resur­rected in the nineties by a visionary of bespoke car culture – was every pubescent boy’s autoerotic fantasy – and the reality of just a handful of billion­aires. But the Spyker story just might be becoming an object lesson on natural selection – and a demon­stration of the theory of evolution applied to the car industry. There’s symmetry to the fact that this is the year of the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150^th of the public­ation of his revolu­tionary book The Origin of Species. We are after all living through a time when nature raw in tooth and claw is expressing its cold impar­ti­ality in deciding what thrives and what perishes – in both the natural world and the business world alike. Whatever its destiny Spyker was born of admirable dreams and inten­tions. Founder Victor Muller’s vision was to fuse aviation design and auto engin­eering brilliance associated with the Spyker brand with a renewed market possib­ility of bespoke vehicles for gentlemen of the utmost discernment and taste. For a while, the mission looked bang on course. There were a series of truly spectacular and innov­ative models, led by the long, torsional C8, the SSUV ‘Peking-​​Paris’ crosser and the sleek, Zagato-​​designed C12. There was the move a couple of years ago into Formula 1, (followed by its swift exit.) Now while the rest of us are getting quickly sick of the forecasts of doom, Spyker are bullishly presenting the production version of the audacious C8 Aerilon at Geneva next month, as well as bringing to market a road going version of their Le Mans race car based on the C8 GT, the LM85. The question remains for Spyker watchers is this: are these fascin­ating breeds doomed to go the way of the dodo – or the way of the platypus (which the Aileron subtly resembles). As Darwin described 150 years ago, highly specialised envir­on­ments call for highly specialised adapt­a­tions. If a genus cannot adapt appro­pri­ately to the envir­onment in which it finds itself, it will eventually become extinct. Anyone who cares about hand wrought brilliance in the face of encroaching automotive mediocrity should pray that Spyker finds its course.