The British automotive industry boasts many automotive manufacturers, found in varying degrees of obscurity. Ginetta is one of those manufacturers that, unlike many others, is still around. While the car has its fair share of lightweight sports cars for the road, the company mostly dabbles in various, single-make racing series, like the Ginetta G40 Cup, Ginetta GT4 Supercup, and others. However, the Leeds-based carmaker has done the unthinkable and challenged Ferrari with their latest creation, the Akula.

The Ginetta Akula was first introduced at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show as a 200mph, Ferrari-priced, flagship model of the brand, mostly known for compact, lightweight sports cars. By all accounts, it was a finished product, ready to be driven, but due to the pandemic and the company's change in focus, the Akula was delayed.

Ginetta released a statement, which explained that during the pandemic, the company's focus has changed towards developing the G56 Academy car and GT4 race car. However, that does not mean the development of the Akula has stopped.

“It has been an uncertain period in time for everyone and we have dedicated our attention on producing competitive race cars to keep the industry thriving not just in the UK but globally too."

The Ginetta Akula is a front-mid-engine sports car that also brings a degree of practicality. Moreover, despite being the British carmaker's most powerful car, it stays true to the Ginetta formula, which is lightness and simplicity. The Ginetta Akula boasts a dry weight of just 2,535 pounds (1,150 kg) with the weight being distributed between the front and rear axles in a 49 to 51 percent fashion.

The suspension is a push-rod operated, double-wishbone setup with coil-overs. The engine is an all-aluminum 6.0-liter, 90-degree V-8, designed in-house. As the internal designation, BB6, suggests, it packs 600 horsepower and peak torque is 520 pound-feet (705 Nm). Ginetta Chairman, Lawrence Tomlinson, says that a BB10 engine is also in the works.

Power goes to the rear axle through a Ginetta-built, six-speed sequential transmission with addle-shifting, connected to the differential and multi-clutch pack through a short carbon-fiber driveshaft.

Ginetta Akula specifications

Lawrence Tomlinson shows obvious excitement for the car's eventual reveal, which was delayed. Despite Ginetta being one of the smaller names in the automotive industry, it has some remarkable achievements.

“We’ve made decent progress on other fronts. We’re racing Toyota in LMP1, we built the first LMP3 car with the blessing of the Le Mans organizers, our GT4 car is very successful globally and we’ve been running the world’s most successful junior racing series for many years. We have all the design and technical capability a project like this needs, we’re a proud British operation, and we need to show it off.”

While the £340,000 price tag may seem a bit too ambitious to some, especially given the fact that the Akula is Ginetta's first supercar. However, Ginetta has proper racing know-how behind it, which has always translated nicely into the British company's road-going models. It also has a cool name since "Akula" means shark in a few Slavic languages, including Bulgarian and Russian, and the car certainly looks like it's ready to devour some of Ferrari's finest offerings, at least on a racetrack.