Spyker C8 1st Gen

Every visual decision traces back to aircraft. Spyker built aeroplanes during the First World War, and the badge, a propeller crossed with a spoked wheel, comes from there. So do the Aeroblade wheels, whose spokes are propeller blades, the engine-turned aluminium dashboard, the rows of aluminium toggle switches, and the original four-spoke propeller steering wheel that safety compliance eventually pushed out. The signature detail is the one that costs money and adds nothing: the gear linkage runs exposed above the transmission tunnel, polished, and it moves when you shift. Around it, quilted leather covers nearly every surface, in a colour chosen car by car. The body is hand-formed aluminium over an aluminium spaceframe, with doors that rise rather than swing and a windscreen that meets the body without a rubber gasket. The Laviolette's contribution is a fixed glass canopy with a roof intake, which resolves the open car's rather upright profile. Maarten de Bruijn drew all of it, and it is closer to one person's car than almost anything else built in the 2000s: the shape follows his own Silvestris prototype from the 1990s, reproportioned. The Laviolette name honours the Belgian engineer behind Spyker's 1903 six-cylinder four-wheel-drive racer.

Spyker Squadron took the C8 to Le Mans nine times between 2002 and 2010, and the record is a lesson in how hard the race is from a standing start. The Double 12 R came first, carrying a Mader-BMW V8 of 480 bhp. It crashed on its competition debut at Sebring in 2002, then retired from Le Mans that June after 142 laps. In 2003 it ran to the finish but was not classified, 229 laps in. The Audi-engined Spyder GT2-R took over from 2005 and failed to finish at all three of its Le Mans attempts, including both cars in 2006 and again in 2007. The Laviolette GT2-R broke the run. After a 43-lap retirement in 2008, the 2009 car shared by Tom Coronel, Jeroen Bleekemolen and Jaroslav Janiš came home 25th overall and fifth in GT2, the marque's best result at the race. The 2010 entry backed it up with 27th and ninth in class. That mattered enough to Spyker to build a road car about it. The Laviolette LM85 wore the GT2-R's burnt orange and gunmetal, was announced as 24 cars for the 24 hours, and took its 85 from the number on the team's race cars.

For a company that built fewer than 300 cars, the C8 got around. Its biggest screen moment is the opening of Basic Instinct 2 in 2006, where Sharon Stone's character drives a black Laviolette through London at speed and off the road into the water at Canary Wharf. Spyker leaned into it and announced a limited edition built to the film car's specification, jet black over red, on magnesium Aeroblade wheels. Before that, Top Gear put Jeremy Clarkson in a C8 Spyder in its fourth series in 2004 and sent the Stig round the track in it, which is how most British enthusiasts learned the marque existed at all. The deeper reach is through games. The Laviolette appeared in Gran Turismo 4, 5 and 6, in Project Gotham Racing 4 and in Test Drive Unlimited, the LM85 turned up in Forza Motorsport 3 and 4, and the Spyder GT2-R raced in GRID and GTR Evolution. A generation of players has driven a Spyker without ever seeing one. Then there is the business chapter. Between the Formula 1 team and the Saab purchase, Spyker spent several years in newspapers that have no motoring section.

The reassuring half of this car is the drivetrain. The V8 and the six-speed transaxle are Audi and Getrag hardware, understood by people well outside the marque, and they are not the fragile part. The demanding half is everything Spyker made itself. Bodywork is hand-formed aluminium, so a damaged panel is fabricated rather than ordered. Trim is quilted to order in a colour the first owner chose. The electric doors have actuators that fail in the end. The 2006 Spyder sold on Bring a Trailer in 2024 had one replaced, and that reads as a normal line in a C8's history rather than a horror story. The bigger reality is behavioural. Most C8s have covered very little ground, and cars that sit acquire problems that cars that run never get: dried seals, tired fluids, seized calipers, dead batteries. Major work often means lifting the engine out, which sounds dramatic and is simply how the car goes together. Spyker has been through bankruptcy twice, so no dealer network stands behind these cars. What exists instead is a small, tightly connected owner community and a handful of specialists who know individual cars by chassis number, and for something this rare that turns out to be enough.