The Prado Zoute has always been the heart of the Zoute Grand Prix, both literally and metaphorically. Physically, the Prado building was the epicentre of events, as it hosted the rallies’ starting grid and finish line. Beyond that, the installation worked as event headquarters and debriefing centre.
The main hall is a large pavilion tent built on the beach, hosting a high-end car show with contemporary super and hypercars along with concepts and a few selected classics. The tent also hosts the primary hospitality services, with restaurants and art corners.
We already noted during our first Zoute in 2019 that the smaller, more cost-efficient, but still very stylish event might be the saviour of car shows. Even before the pandemic, Paris and Frankfurt were under pressure from several directions. Companies increasingly stayed away or reduced their budget. This year’s Paris Car Show featured a handful of French brands and no European import brands at all.
The Prado Zoute features far more brands than the Paris Car Show and offers a true spectacle to visitors, albeit on a smaller scale.
The Prado car show might not be a match for the big international ones, but the compact stages can pack a massive punch of adrenaline even with a 3-5 car line-up. We saw a lot of positive signs, like the post-Brexit return of British brands and quite a few dream cars, like the De Tomaso and the Remac.
The organisers promise 21 premium car partners ranging from small high-end manufacturers to mainstream premium companies. We did not count them all, but we saw more noble brands than in IAA Munich 2022 or Paris Mondiale 2018. They presented their most beautiful and latest car designs and technical innovations with European or Belgian premieres.
You get to see pretty decent efforts from brands that otherwise shine away from most big car shows. Companies like Lotus or McLaren came with impressive supercars and novelties surrounded by appropriate decoration. With an Aston Valhalla, you don’t really need that much decoration, but the stages were well thought out and offered the right amount of decoration.
The first car that made us drop the anchor and our jaws at the same time, was the Rimac Nevera. This electric supercar car has the specs to beat even the pure race-bred hypercars. The Nevera is powered by four electric motors driving each wheel.
The drivetrain produces a total of 1,427 kW (1,914 hp) and 2,360 Nm of torque. Rimac claims a 0–60 mph acceleration in 1.85 seconds, making it the fastest-accelerating production car in the entire world. The Nevera production is limited to 150 vehicles, but the platform is now shared with other brands, and the Rimac factory is now also assembling the Pininfarina Battista.
One of the great things about Zoute was the possibility of seeing dream cars up close. This is best illustrated by the fact that we could see the Nevera’s interior.
Behind the Nevera, three Bentleys await visitors, including a lavish GTC Mulliner.
The Aston Martin stage features a Valhalla, Aston’s top-of-the-range Hypercar. The Valhalla is a road legal version of the Valkyre, Aston’s small production hybrid sports car developed in cooperation with Red Bull Racing Advanced Technologies and several others.
This means Adrian Newey, the most brilliant mind in car racing, was involved. He is responsible for the vast majority of F1 champion cars. 13 champion cars in the past 30 years; the numbers speak for themselves.
Speaking of numbers, the car also has the specs to back up the claims. The Valkyre’s 6.5-litre V12 engine produces around 1,000 hp at 10,500 rpm, making it the most powerful naturally-aspirated engine in any road car.
The V12 is assisted by a hybrid boost system akin to the KERS fitted to F1 cars, with batteries delivered by Rimac. The Valhalla’s engine will be somewhat behind, with a Mercedes AMG based V8.
Lotus tried to top that with its Limitless tour showcasing its three main models at several high-end car events. We also met the Lotus-trio at Chantilly Concours, where they filled one of the largest booths.
The red car is the Lotus Emira, the successor to the Evora and flagbearer of the traditional bloodline of lightweight sportscars. Lotus claims it will be their last ever vehicle that was still powered by an internal combustion engine.
The most significant novelty was the Lotus Eletre, a high-performance battery-electric mid-size luxury crossover SUV. The car is based on the Lotus Premium architecture that will underpin the company’s future electric models.
And Lotus has big plans with that: they want to release models in both the lower middle (Golf- sized) and upper middle (E-Class-sized) segments. The car’s highlights include a LiDAR system, digital side mirrors and a floating infotainment system.
The last Lotus was an Evidja, the company’s new electric hypercar project. The car will be manufactured by Lotus Cars, relying on the vast resources of Lotus owner Geely and the technical support of Williams Advanced Engineering. The Evija shall accelerate from 0 to 100 in under 3 seconds and tops at over 320 km/h.
The last car on this side was a De Tomaso P72, an old friend from various high-end car shows. We have seen at least five different specimens with entirely different colour combinations, and they all were spectacular without exception.
This green one was turning heads even after the Valhalla and the Evija. Every single P72 specimen we saw was simply oozing style. You would never guess that the car has German roots: it is based on technology provided by sportscar manufacturer Gumpert, owned by the same Hongkong based company. The P72 is based on the Ferrari-derived technical platform of the Apollo Intensa Emozione.
We counted at least five awesome and out-of-this-world super/hypercar so far, without noting the other 200.000+ euro dream cars, and this was just the first row of stages. There will be so much more…
On the opposite side of the hallway, BMW kicks off with a trio from the top of its offering. The BMW XM is the swan song of the internal combustion engine. It is a plug-in hybrid-electric full-size luxury SUV developed and marketed under the BMW M subsidiary.
The XM is powered by a BMW 4.4 L V8 paired with an electric motor integrated into the eight-speed automatic gearbox. The drivetrain produces 800 Nm, and its total combined output peaks at 653 PS.
BMW stuffed all its know-how into this car, including a torque vectoring AWD and catalogue values that border on the impossible. The 4 second to 100 is an impressive result for a petrol engine car, as long as you forget the specs of the Nevera.
The only thing not worthy of the ICE swan song was the brutish design of the car, and BMW’s other novelty could not make up for that either. The I7 is a 7-series BMW with an electric drivetrain.
Maserati recently unveiled a brand new model, a successor to a long-standing coupé bloodline that Maserati has been producing successfully since the 90s.
Unfortunately, Maserati did not bring this new 2023 Granturismo, but they focussed on the recent Grecale, with several show cars to touch and feel.
Of course, they spared some space for the MC20 mid-engine sportscar too.
Alpine brought along an F1 race car, surrounded by a few special editions of their only road-legal model. Not like their A110 would need that sort of extra heads-up (that car is one of the crispiest rides available on the market today), but we still appreciated the effort…
The remaining part of this corner was dedicated to German premium brands. Mercedes invoked its glorious past with the Gullwing, the powerful present with an AMG SL Roadster and the bright future with an all-electric EQS SUV.
Audi did not bother with a stage in the traditional sense. They brought a concept car, the Audi A6 e-Tron, that foreshadows the future generation of the A6 limousine.
Now we are halfway through the Prado hall, we can’t say we got bored, and we already saw more brands than at the Paris Car Show this year. Now, we take a rhetorical break, but we will be back with a second post.
For an overview of the Zoute, we recommend to a pay a visit to the intro article on the event:
