CAV Revives the GT40 Silhouette With an 800-HP Twin-Supercharged Restomod

For nearly three decades, Cape Advanced Vehicles built one thing and built it well. The Cape Town shop turned out meticulous GT40 replicas, more than 220 of them, with faithful reproduction as its entire reason for being.

The GT MkII tears up that script entirely. Unveiled 60 years to the hour after the GT40’s 1-2-3 Le Mans demolition of Ferrari, this isn’t a replica at all. CAV calls it a “series-production restomod supercar,” which is a polite way of saying the company just bet its whole identity on doing something original.

Look at it quickly and the GT40 cues are all right there. The low nose, the broad hips, the Gulf-style Miles Blue livery with the number one on the door.

Look closer and almost nothing is period-correct. The headlights are sharper, the proportions are bigger (a real relief for anyone who’s tried to fold into a real 40-inch-tall GT40), and the swan-wing doors actually let you get in. And the heart is a 4.2-liter aluminum V8 that CAV openly bills as “Audi-derived.” The motoring press has run further with it, betting the entire donor chassis is a repurposed Audi R8, though that part stays unconfirmed.

CAV bolted not one but two Rotrex centrifugal superchargers onto that V8, the kind of overkill nobody requested and everybody suddenly wants.

The payoff is a claimed 800 horsepower at 7,800 rpm and 649 lb-ft of torque, all of it on regular 95-octane pump gas, spinning to a 9,000-rpm redline the naturally aspirated original never dreamed of. All-wheel drive sorts the traction, and CAV quotes zero to 62 mph in 3.0 seconds flat with a top speed north of 204 mph.

The hardware reads like an enthusiast’s wish list. The setup includes KW Variant 4 three-way adjustable dampers, Brembo brakes with eight-piston front calipers, an active-valved Inconel exhaust, and six drive modes parked right on the steering wheel.

But the detail that actually matters most to us sits all the way at the bottom of the order sheet. A six-speed semi-auto is standard and a dual-clutch is optional, yet CAV will still happily sell you a proper three-pedal manual. An 800-hp all-wheel-drive supercar with a clutch pedal, in 2026, pitched by its own maker as “the antidote to EV madness.”

CAV is building just 40 GT MkIIs globally for the 60th Anniversary Edition, with only 20 wearing the Miles Blue Metallic and orange livery shown here. Pricing hasn’t been announced.

Cape Advanced Vehicles GT MkII

After 27 years of building GT40 replicas, CAV goes its own way with the GT MkII, an 800-hp, twin-supercharged, AWD restomod that hides a suspected Audi R8 under classic Le Mans bodywork.

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