Even in a normal year, the scene I found inside a luxury car garage in central London was unusual. It was here in Marylebone, on a murky November morning, that I found a young Zimbabwean aviation and sex toy tycoon who had devoted his life to fulfilling a boyhood dream: building his own hypercar. Ameerh Naran , who is 34, stood next to a full-size model of the Naran, a 1,048 brake-horse-power “hyper-coupé” currently in production in Germany. He’s making 48 of the four-seater cars initially and offering buyers the chance to customise pretty much everything. Prices start at US$1,1 million, but Naran expected most builds would exceed US$1,3m. It was a mad, muscular looking beast, with a shark-like nose, gold-leaf trim, and giant spoilers. The boxy exhaust housings looked like a pharaoh’s cat flaps. It dwarfed the Lamborghini parked next to it — and Naran himself, who presented rather more elegantly in a navy Celine blazer with immaculately pressed mustard trousers and patent Ferragamo loafers. “We’ve got a client who’s big into horses and we’re working out a way to do the interior using horse hair,” Naran said of the cars, the design for which he is revealing today (it won’t smell of a horse, he assured me). “We have another client who has a tattoo on his body that we’re embroidering into the car.” A tattoo of what? “He’s honestly very high-profile, if I said you would know who he is.” Such was life in the rarefied world of the limited-run hypercar, in which lowly supercars — your off-the-shelf Ferraris and Lamborghinis — became the antelopes to the hypercar’s apex predator. It’s a trend that arguably started in 1993 with the McLaren F1. Other exotic species have included the Bugatti Veyron and the Swedish marque Koenigsegg. Some came and flamed out, while others became highly collectible; the F1 cost about £1,2m in today’s money at its launch. Last year, one sold for £16,2m. If 2020 seemed like a perverse year to launch a US$1million car, well, the supercar market had rallied. The very wealthy had money to burn, and a desire to invest in collectibles. Ferrari’s share price, meanwhile, had exceeded its pre-pandemic high. Ameerh said his customers came from sport, music, and big business. All of them had expensively stocked garages. They were the spenders for whom a million pounds on a shiny new toy wasn’t such a stretch. Not that anything 2020 has thrown Naran’s way would have diverted him from a journey he said he began 30 years ago. While exotic car fantasies were hardly rare in children, Ameerh’s entrepreneurial background — he descended from Indian immigrants who built a small shoe manufacturing empire (Conte Shoes) in Zimbabwe — gave him different ideas. Just getting behind the wheel wasn’t going to cut it. “I was four when I decided my purpose in life was to build my own supercar company,” he said, solemnly. Everything since had been in service to that dream — and amassing the huge pile of cash (an undisclosed amount) required to make it real. At school in Harare, Naran sold tadpoles to his classmates and later be
