Three pedals, on purpose
Spyker has built a new car. That sentence has been wrong often enough over the past ten years that it is worth repeating: on August 14, 2026, at The Quail during Monterey Car Week, the Dutch marque showed the C8 Preliator XXV Coupé, and it is real, and it has a clutch pedal.
The engine is a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 making a claimed 800 hp and 1,000 Nm, revving to 8,000 rpm. It drives through a six-speed manual. Not an automated single-clutch, not a dual-clutch with a stick-shaped selector. A manual.
Nothing else on sale at this output offers a manual gearbox. That is the whole argument for this car, and Spyker seems to know it.
Twenty-five will be built.
Made the slow way
The bodywork is hand-shaped aluminium, panel by panel, at Coventry Prototype Panels in England, laid over a spaceframe Spyker engineered in-house. The company puts it at roughly 2,100 hours per car.
The car shown carries chassis number 270, which Spyker describes as following the last of the 255 Spykers built since 2000. The interior is the part that has always separated this marque from everything else: exposed gear linkage, aviation-style gauges, and quilted leather, with the copper brightwork running through the cabin and out onto the wheels.
| Engine | 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 |
| Power | 800 hp (see below) |
| Torque | 1,000 Nm |
| Max revs | 8,000 rpm |
| Gearbox | Six-speed manual |
| Dry weight | 1,525 kg |
| 0-100 km/h | 2.7 s (see below) |
| Production | 25 cars |
About that power figure
Worth being straight about this, because the numbers are not settled and we would rather say so than pick the flattering one.
Spyker's press release and the spec panel on its own product page both state 800 hp and a 2.7-second 0-100 km/h. The metadata on that same page, and the structured data underneath it, instead say "900+ HP" and 2.9 seconds. Several outlets have separately reported 789 hp, which is what 800 PS converts to.
So the marque is publishing two different power outputs and two different sprint times on one web page. We have gone with the 800 hp and 2.7 s that the release and the visible specification agree on, and we will correct it the moment Spyker settles the matter.
Three other things are simply absent. There is no price. There are no dimensions. And there is no top speed, only the release's phrasing that it exceeds 217 mph, which is a floor rather than a figure, so the model page shows a dash rather than a rounded-up guess. Spyker also does not state which wheels are driven.
Who owns it now
Victor Muller, who founded the modern company in 2000, is back as CEO. The co-owner is Volodymyr Nosov, through W Group. Spyker states an ambition to return to endurance GT3 racing, without a timeline attached.
The marque dates to 1880 and built the first six-cylinder car, and it has now been declared finished more than once. A 146-year-old badge on a hand-beaten aluminium body with a manual gearbox behind an 800 hp V8 is an unreasonable thing to attempt in 2026. That is more or less the point.
Sources: Spyker C8 Preliator XXV Coupé: 146 Years in the Making. A New Era Begins. (Spyker Cars, August 14, 2026); C8 Preliator XXV Coupé (Spyker Cars). Photography: Spyker Cars.