1991 Vector W8 TwinTurbo Is Late to the 80s-Supercar Party

From the May 1991 issue of Car and Driver.

9:00 a.m. Monday, Wilmington, Califor­nia—We arrive at Vector headquarters, nestled in an industrial ghetto between the Los Angeles and Long Beach har­bors. Jerry Wiegert has lured us with the promise of an exclusive first crack at test­ing his audacious supercar, which has been the subject of great intrigue and speculation since we covered his first running prototype in December 1980.

The decade since then has been long and hard for Wiegert, who, like Ferruccio Lamborghini in the early sixties, decided to take on the established supercar or­der. Unlike Lamborghini, however, who was a wealthy industrialist, Wiegert was a young industrial designer without a per­sonal fortune. Although Wiegert often boasts of the Vector’s ten years of devel­opment, he spent much of the eighties scratching for cash. That he survived is a testament to his dedication to his brain­child and his gift for self-promotion.

He scored a financial victory in No­vember 1988, when a public stock offer­ing in the newly reconstituted Vector Aeromotive Corporation raised $6 mil­lion. Wiegert’s company got $4.9 million and the remainder went to his underwrit­er, Blinder, Robinson & Company, which has since filed for bankruptcy.

That cash infusion and a later one in­flated what had been Wiegert’s shoe­string operation into a 40,000-square­-foot plant employing 82 workers—the plant we have just entered. Palletized en­gines, bins of suspension parts, stacks of complex castings, half a dozen cars un­der construction, and a score of busy employees fill the final assembly area. The Vector operation is real indeed.

David Kostka, Vector’s vice president for engineering, shows us the gray and red engineering prototypes that we are to test as we wait for the truck he has or­dered to haul the cars up to our designat­ed testing sites.

11:30 a.m, Angeles Crest Highway—We unload the Vectors in the San Gabriel Mountains. Although the W8’s styling is about fifteen years old, the car is still an ocular magnet. Its snout is higher and longer than the current fashion and the body creases are too sharp, but like the late Lamborghini Countach, the Vector has a timeless visual appeal.

Inside, the Vector has the blocky, hand­-tailored, somewhat homemade look indigenous to most limited-production cars, but the fashion theme is jet-fighter cockpit. There’s a computerized instru­ment display on which the driver can choose one of four information displays. And the black-anodized aluminum eye­ball air vents, the Allen-head cap screws, the push-to-reset circuit breakers, and the illuminated square switches not only look like aircraft parts, they are aircraft parts—very expensive ones at that.

Not surprisingly, the seating position is very low, but visibility forward is excel­lent, gradually deteriorating as one’s view traverses toward the rear. The Recaro C seats are superbly comfortable, the driv­ing position is good, and there’s ample leg and headroom in the wide cockpit.

The tilting, air-bag-equipped steering wheel is a pleasant surprise, but the shift­er is a disappointment. Buried in a well to the left of the driver’s seat, a short lever topped by a crossbar controls the Vec­tor’s three-speed automatic transmis­sion—a much modified version of the GM unit developed for the original Olds Toronado more than 25 years ago.

The handle moves through the usual park-reverse-neutral-drive sequence to allow fully automatic operation. When you lift the handle, it becomes a ratchet shifter, shifting up or down a gear with each fore or aft movement.

Upon firing up the Vector, we find that the shifter, buried in its tight little well, does not fall readily to hand. When you do grab it, screws protrude from its un­derside and there’s a heavy, sticky action. With the gearbox in drive, the transmis­sion upshifts at very low rpm and refuses to kickdown when you floor the accelera­tor at anything above city speed.

Under way though, the red prototype feels tight and solid, although the engine is loud. During our cornering passes for the photographer, the suspension seems supple and well controlled. The power steering is too light, however, and it doesn’t provide as much self-centering action as we like in 200-mph cars.

Our photography completed, we head toward our desert test site. The 3680-pound Vector is quick, with the twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter V-8 building boost and thrust quickly. Above 4000 rpm, the push is strong enough to make Vector’s claim of 625 hp believable.

Soon, however, we find ourselves coasting. The engine is still running, but the transmission has ceased communica­tion with the rear wheels. We glide to a halt on the shoulder of Angeles Forest Highway. After a few minutes of fiddling, Kostka suggests we press on with the gray car, while his mechanic coasts down the mountain with the red car toward a nearby restaurant to summon the truck.

3:00 p.m., C/D desert test site near Ed­wards AFB—Instruments in place, we start our testing. Although Vector litera­ture calls the W8 the fastest production car in the world, Kostka asks us to refrain from top-speed testing because of insuf­ficient high-speed development. Since we’re not paid enough to be 200-mph guinea pigs, we agree, but wonder pri­vately about the overseas owners of the three cars already delivered.

Top-gear acceleration is strong, but the transmission is slipping out of third gear. The brakes are powerful; only pre­mature rear lockup extends the stopping distance from 70 mph to 191 feet.

We’re ready to do the acceleration runs, but the coolant-temperature gauge has surged to 250 degrees, and wisps of steam are wafting through the louvered engine cover. Kostka suspects an air bub­ble in the cooling system and suggests waiting a bit before adding water.

After two hours of waiting and drib­bling water into the Vector’s expansion tank (to avoid cracking the hot head or block with a sudden deluge of cold wa­ter), darkness is approaching, and we de­cide to go to the nearby skidpad. Al­though the surface is wet, the Vector circulates at an admirable 0.91 g, with a touch of tail-happiness at the limit. We suspect it would probably pull in the area of 0.95 g on dry pavement.

The skidpad testing overheats the en­gine again, so we spend another hour cooling the cooling system. Kostka final­ly suggests we try an acceleration run. Not only does the temperature skyrocket as soon as we leg it, but the engine deto­nates fiercely and the transmission reso­lutely resists shifting into third gear. We decide to pack it in while the Vector can still limp home under its own power.

9:00 a.m. Tuesday, Wilmington—While the mechanics are puzzling over the gray Vector’s cooling system, Mark Bailey, vice president for production, gives us a tour of the premises.

Bailey learned his trade fabricating aerospace components at Northrop, and he is simultaneously enthusiastic about the Vector and frank about the problems gearing up the assembly line. “We’re just now finishing the engineering drawings and fixtures for the parts. Many of the first sheetmetal pieces had to be traced from prototype components.”

Despite these handicaps, chassis num­ber 14 is in progress at the frame shop, one of the dozen or so cars somewhere in the production process at any one time.

The Vector’s core is formed by a weld­ed chrome-molybdenum steel-tubing roll cage reinforced by riveted aluminum panels and an aluminum honeycomb floorpan. Riveted and bonded aluminum monocoque structures extend from this central core to mount the suspension and driveline components, a well as to provide crush zones and bumper supports. Bailey bemoans the cost of pump­ing the 6000 or so rivets that go into each Vector, but the superbly crafted chassis easily passed the Department of Transportation’s crash tests.

The body is made of fiberglass, carbon fiber, and Kevlar composite panels. Each set of panels is individually fitted to a matched chassis, then finished with cata­lyzed paint. The result is smooth body­work, a gleaming finish, and admirably even gaps—quality in keeping with the Vector’s $400,000-plus price.

The running gear is equally top-draw­er. The front hubs and uprights are Grand National stock-car pieces. The brakes are huge Alcon rotors with alumi­num calipers all around. The engine is a race-prepped small-block Chevy, assem­bled by a subcontractor using top-grade aftermarket components such as a Rodeck aluminum block, Air Flow Re­search aluminum heads, TRW pistons, and Carrillo rods.

Rated at 625 hp with 10-psi boost from its twin turbos, the V-8 had not received emissions certification at press time. But Jasjit Rarewala, the very experienced exotic car certifier in charge, promises that it will pass the tests soon.

The powertrain tucks into the engine compartment bolted to a pair of intricate blue-anodized aluminum plates the size of doormats, which attach from the rear bulkhead. The glittering array of pol­ished aluminum, braided stainless-steel plumbing, and heavy-duty heat exchang­ers is an impressive sight.

As we photograph the engine, Kostka promises to have the gray car’s overheat­ing problem solved by evening.

7:00 p.m. same night, Wilmington—We leave for another crack at testing, this time at a most unofficial track. Kostka and I make for the nearby Terminal Is­land Freeway, which should be deserted at this hour. In the five-minute drive to the freeway, the engine overheats again. We return to the factory with the Vector bleeding steam from its haunches.

Wiegert is tense and unhappy. “The car is sound, you can see that. It has been tested and punished to the max.” He attributes the breakdowns to obsolete parts in the development cars we’ve been driving, explaining: “You put the best stuff in the cars you have to ship.”

He seems desperate for us to complete a successful test and presses us to stay until the cars can be fixed. Unfortunately, we’re scheduled to leave for Michigan the next morning. But we offer him an­other shot if one of the cars is repaired before flight time.

2:30 a.m. Wednesday, Los Angeles—The phone jars me awake in my hotel room near Los Angeles International. Kostka says he has the red car running again. We agree to meet in the lobby at 3:00 a.m.

Even in the dark of early morning, the arrival of the Vector perks up the hotel’s skeleton staff. Kostka and I hop in, fol­lowed by one of his mechanics in a Sub­urban. This time we head toward Per­shing Avenue—a limited-access divided four-lane road just west of the airport that should be barren at this hour.

The red car is running strong. Its tem­perature stays in the low 200s and there is no sign of detonation. After four runs, our best 0-to-60 time is 3.8 seconds, and we measure a standing quarter-mile in twelve seconds flat at 118 mph. Those times are good enough to edge out a Ferrari F40. There was room to go faster, but the car refused to upshift into third gear and the engine was hitting its rev limiter well short of its 7000-rpm redline.

I drive over to the waiting Kostka so that he can check it out. He confirms the problems, and we find that reverse is also gone. We call it a night, and I am back in my room at 4:00 a.m.

“It costs us substantially more to build this car than it costs Ferrari to build an F40,” says Jerry Wiegert. Judging by the premium components, fine craftsman­ship, and excellent finish of the cars he is shipping, that may well be true. But in development and engineering, we sus­pect Ferrari has outspent Vector.

Will the Vector satisfy the demanding supercar buyer? Perhaps. But this ques­tion doesn’t frighten Jerry Wiegert. “My customers are big guys; they’ve got attor­neys, they know what to do if they’re not satisfied.”

Is Wiegert himself satisfied? No per­fectionist ever is. “I will improve this car through my team and efforts.”

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