Have you ever seen or heard of the movie ‘Rising Sun’? It starred Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, and here’s the official trailer, just in case you’re curious. It came out in 1993, and well, it sucked. Big time….
Funnily enough, the only thing worth remembering about that movie, apart from how much badly it sucked, was a car that had a brief appearance at the beginning and somewhere toward the middle. It was a red Vector W8, and it holds the accolade of being America’s first supercar.
The brainchild of Gerald “Jerry” Wiegert, an aeronautics buff who even named his company Vector Aeromotive instead of ‘automotive’, the Vector featured actual instrumentation and switch-gear from a fighter jet. For example the centre Electro Luminescent display came from the same supplier used by the US Military for their F-117A Stealth fighter jets, which you can see in this short video below…
In fact, the entire instrumentation cluster and dashboard was deliberately made to look like it came directly from a fighter jet. Apparently, Jerry was a bit army-barmy, and only his poor eyesight prevented him from becoming a Top Gun ace himself.
The Vector W8 was powered by a 6.0-litre V8 intercooled twin-turbo engine that produced 625bhp and 880Nm of torque, sending power to the back wheels via a 3-speed auto gearbox. No, really… three speeds. But back in 1989 those performance figures were nothing short of biblical.
For a better understanding of the company, here’s a very rare video of the goings-on behind Vector Aeromotive…
Only a handful of Vector W8’s were ever made, not because of the usual lack of funds surrounding independent supercar builds like the Cizeta-Moroder V16T we highlighted last week, instead, apparently new investors Megatech (the Indonesian business conglomerate that also owned Lamborghini at the time, 1994 to be exact) who bought controlling interest in Vector Aeromotive, ousted Gerald Wiegert.
Since Wiegert personally held the copyrights and patent to the Vector W8, well, it died when he left. Costing a cool $440,000 when new, only 19 were ever made. Its exclusivity still sees it coming up for auction once in a while, like here, at RM Auctions in 2015…
A sad end to what could have possibly been the start of amazing fighter-jet inspired supercars for the road…
All photos from Google Images.
