[Auto] Praga Begins Delivering Its Lightweight, Track-Ready Bohema Supercar

[Wolf.17]

 

The Praga Bohema is the Czech automaker's first roadgoing production supercar, with a focus on track performance through aerodynamics and minimizing weight.

Praga, which has been building all manner of vehicles for over 100 years, just delivered the first production-spec Bohema to a customer in the Netherlands.

The Bohema will reach its first U.S. customer this spring, with fewer than 20 cars expected to be produced each year.

Each year, a handful of new would-be automakers emerge, showing off images of outlandish supercars and making lofty claims about being the fastest, most powerful, or most bespoke. On the surface, you might think the Praga Bohema fits into this mold. But the Czech company actually has over 100 years of history in vehicle production—from trucks to airplanes to karts—and has been building track-ready racers for over a decade. And, most notably, the street-legal Praga Bohema is real, with the company today handing over the first unit to a customer in the Netherlands.

 

Praga first showed a prototype version of the Bohema two years ago, but it has kept fairly quiet since. This is by design. "As quietly as we can, we've gone about this and got it done," said Mark Harrison, Praga's sales and marketing director, who explained the company's mentality was "we're not going to go talking about this until it's ready to be ordered and bought." Now that Praga is ready to unleash the Bohema onto public roads after seven years of development, let's take a closer look at the car.

The Bohema is powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V-6, and yes, this is a modified version of the mill found under the hood of the iconic R35 Nissan GT-R. The engine has been tweaked by Litchfield Motors, a UK-based performance car dealer and tuner, with founder Iain Litchfield connecting Praga with Nissan for the engine supply deal.

Litchfield's changes include converting the engine to a dry-sump design to lower overall height by 5.5 inches and attaching new turbos. The motor churns out 700 horsepower and 535 pound-feet of torque. Fifteen years ago, those numbers would have grabbed headlines, but nowadays, in a world of 1775-horsepower Bugattis and 1025-hp pickup trucks, 700 ponies might be met with a shrug.

But, as chief engineer Jan Martinek told Car and Driver, Praga is "not fighting the horsepower war." Nor is Praga aiming for top-speed records—the Bohema's claimed 197-mph top speed is likely the maximum velocity you could reach on most racetracks anyway. Instead, Praga is focused on driving engagement and track performance. "The car is about purity," said Martinek. "We know from racing it's all about lightweight and aerodynamics, so this is what we want to combine."

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a63111840/praga-bohema-supercar-deliveries-history/