While Praga has concerned itself mainly with go-karts, race cars and Dakar trucks in recent years, it made street cars back in 1907. Now it’s back with the Bohema, a stunning, lightweight supercar with the 700-horsepower heart of a Nissan GT-R.
This Czech company is unconcerned about keeping up with electrification, or getting into horsepower, acceleration or top-speed battles with the hypercar class. They’re racers; they know what they like. What they like is light weight, lots of grip and downforce, and an insatiable appetite for corners.
The Bohema weighs in at a remarkable 982 kg (2.165 lb) – that’s just 2 kg (4.4 lb) heavier than Gordon Murray’s ludicrous T.50 “fan car,” itself an absolute outlier among high-end street-legal cars. It’s a carbon body on a carbon frame, naturally, with some meek application of Alcantara the only thing between the driver and the carbon race seats.
The 3.8-liter, twin-turbo V6 Nissan GT-R engine is sent to Litchfield Engineering, where it’s converted to a dry sump to fit in the savagely low Bohema chassis, and tuned up with even bigger turbos to hit a target of 700 hp, with at least 725 Nm (535 lb-ft) of torque from 3,000 to 6,000 rpm going to the rear wheels through a Hewland sequential gearbox.
The aerodynamics are extreme. You could spread out a tablecloth and have a picnic on the front splitter, park your other car under the diffusers and do your ironing on the floating rear wing. The front wheels are all but open, separated from the rest of the car by savage aero gaps that three or four cats could sleep in, and there are scoops and flaps everywhere you’d want to see them. Praga says it generates 900 kg (1,984 lb) of downforce at 250 km/h (155 mph), so by the time you break 300 km/h (186 mph) and run into the top speed, you might well be able to drive upside down.
The doors open upward, as they jolly well ought to, and Praga says it’s even helpfully included little steps so you don’t need to stomp your muddy loafers all over the seats to get in. At €1.28 million (US$1.34 million), it’s very much a high-end car, but that price puts it at the low end of the high end. It might not have an exotic, hand-built engine, or a hybrid system, or a particularly recognizable name on the badge, but Praga’s ample experience at the racetrack and super-lightweight approach could well make the Bohema one of the fastest street-legal cars around a track.
Ten cars will be built for delivery in 2023, and Praga says it’s looking to build 20 more in each of the following four years.
Praga debuts its savagely beautiful, ultra-lightweight Bohema supercar [New Atlas]