Boutique American supercar maker and racing outfit Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus has been plotting a more mainstream offering for a while now, but the SCG004S project, with its more approachable exterior that echoes both the Noble M15 and the 2017 Ford GT as well as having a McLaren F1-style 3-seat layout, has been slow to materialise.
Recently, however, it has surfaced that the company has secured a cracking engine for it, possibly to result in more of the car’s development reaching completion. Reportedly, the motor itself is a twin-turbocharged V6 from Nissan. Specifically, it’s the same VR38DETT that they use in the GT-R. By itself, that’s interesting news as we expected the Japanese automaker to be a little more guarded about one of their best assets, but more power to SCG, who announced the 004S as having a 5.0-litre V8.
That said, the engine won’t be left stock either, as Nissan has apparently given them free rein to tune it up however they want, no strings attached. And tune they will, says Autocar, with the entry level variant purported to have around 515kW.
With that in mind, and given how far third party tuners have managed to push the Nissan VR motor, it wouldn’t beyond reason to expect the most powerful permutation of the SCG004S to boast an output north of 700kW.
Such is the beauty of a proven engine. Lotus has used Toyota engines in all their cars in the past decade to great effect, supercharging it to higher numbers with each new iteration. Another example of this practice would be Gumpert (now known as Apollo Automobil), who in 2006 previously used a 4.2-litre V8 sourced from Audi with added twin-turbochargers upped power as high as 588kW. Their upcoming car, the Arrow, also uses an Audi engine, a 4.0-litre unit mutated to produce over 740kW.
With the VR38DETT as essentially a blank canvas, SCG have plenty of room to manoeuvre. It’s also likely that the SCG004S, if it does use the engine, to use the same 7-speed dual-clutch transmission as the Nissan GT-R.
With a name long enough to require abbreviation, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus hasn’t exactly become a household name in the intervening time since their first car, the SCG 003, emerged in 2014. And it will likely face some uphill skirmishes even if they play the marketing and PR game flawlessly thanks to its less than phonetically gifted moniker. We’re also hoping that ‘SCG004S’ is just an internal identifier and that the final car will have a name less in common with a refrigerator.
