It has a look of a smooth Lamborghini, the color of a Cayenne Sport, a girl's name, and 240 horsepower. The Russian sports car Marussia has been unveiled to the public – to both admiration and skepticism.

“Russia’s automobile industry has only one chance to move ahead [of its foreign counterparts]: by starting to produce UFOs straight away”
(a Russian saying)

Russia’s automobile manufacturers have found a niche that might help to overcome their foreign competitors: huge investments into the metal body once made by major companies, which now prevent them from utilising newer predominantly non-metal bodies. The Marussia project will now attempt to capitalise on this, by omitting the usage of wing spars, making exchangeable bodies, and developing an electric engine, but experts are skeptical.

GT Roots

The man behind Marussia is former FIA N-GT racing champion, popular Russian singer, TV-anchor and theatrical actor (his new play is just out in Moscow’s Pushkin Theater) Nikolay Fomenko.

During his travels around the world while participating in the FIA Gran Turismo races Fomenko developed a set of peculiar ideas on sports car making. After finishing his driving-career in 2006 – with the help of his partner Efim Ostrovsky, a renowned political crisis-manager – Fomenko started to work on the Marussia.

Although most of the car’s parts – including the engine, which will be courtesy of either Nissan or Renault – are made abroad, some 35% of them are genuinely Russian, along with all the designs.

Crisis dichotomy

Russia’s leading automobile guru Aleksandr Pikulenko played down Marussia’s perspectives, pointing out the most expensive part of the work – that of installing and tweaking the engine – is yet to be done, which might be tough in the times of global economic crisis.

Fomenko on the contrary hopes the crisis will in fact act in favour of Marussia, which will cost cheaper than other cars of its class.

“There can be no crisis in the real sector,” Fomenko claimed with conviction. “We hope the ecological transition will come soon enough. If our innovative work goes as planned we will have electrical cars that can travel 400 kilometres without recharge by mid-2009”.

“The project might get an extra dimension when the electric engine version is introduced, but it will inevitably lead to a dramatic increase of price, like it did with the $100,000-Tesla Roadster,” Pikulenko agreed.

“The problem in Russia is not even the electric engine, but the battery,” Ostrovsky stressed. “Our cold climate negatively affects their capacity. We dug in that direction and have found a very interesting nanotech project made at one of Russia’s big construction bureaus. It might help solve the battery problem”.

First consumer versions of Marussia will be shipped in Autumn 2009, while its sports version will take part in the 2010 edition of FIA Gran Turismo season.

Ruben Zarbabyan, RT