Inside the hypercar

They are at the very pinnacle of car development and they are so rare it's possible you won't even see one in the flesh during your lifetime.

But hypercars are real, and even if they merely populate your daydreams there are people out there who actually make a business out of designing them, testing and building them, and then selling them to what is possibly the world's most exclusive cohort of car owners. Australia is barely a recognised market, where only the big-name hypercar manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari have the will and the means to homologate their creations.

Hypercars are to ordinary cars what a manned space probe is to a single-engine Cessna. They exist largely through the passion of their designers and the ability of their buyers to spend enormous sums on something that is designed, essentially, to transport a couple of people from point A to point B. Maybe not as rapidly as even the most basic Cessna aircraft, but about as quickly as humanly possible in a land-bound vehicle.

And although there are numerous well-known and high-profile builders involved – Porsche, Ferrari, even Bugatti – the most interesting thing about this genre of cars is that some of the designers and builders exist in almost perfect anonymity. Ask anybody with a passing interest in cars about the latest offering from Koenigsegg, or Pagani, and you might, for all intents and purposes, be asking about an exotic liqueur, or a type of cheese. Certainly not a car.

All this probably won't change with the release of a big screen feature film "Apex: The Story of the Hypercar" early in 2015. But there's a good chance many moviegoers will experience something new, and informative, and that car fans will discover something that will keep them talking, and queuing up for repeat viewings, for some time.

The film, which is being recorded in the new ultra-high resolution 4K format, aims at getting deep into the philosophies and machinations of the hypercar builders, especially those not known to the general public.

For example the crew spent a lot of time with the Swedish hypercar creator Koenigsegg and its latest creation, the One:1 – a production run of six 450km/h-plus cars, each with one megawatt of power and more than 1000Nm of torque, or enough muscle to do justice to a B-double prime mover.

The film looks into the mystique of the hypercar: What defines the genre, how the contenders square off against each other and who buys them. The latter is a rich list in itself, since the world market is only a few hundred vehicles a year and prices bear very little relativity to ordinary cars such as a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Equally as interesting is the funding of these exotic companies, and the passion that drives the people behind them.

A 30-minute pre-release screening for Apex: The Story Of The Hypercar will take place at the Jalopnik Film Festival in New York on November 5 and 6 this year, with general release to follow during the first months of 2015. No dates have as yet been announced for Australian release, but you can watch the trailer below.