Meet the Flying Brick, a car that’s just about as badass as Peaky Blinders’ protagonist, a certain Thomas Shelby. With its dominating hot-rod demeanor, reinforced by visible exhausts, gnarly front bumpers, and a carbon-fiber body, this mafioso’s town car was actually designed for Russian billionaire and avid drift-master Sergei Kabargin. The name Flying Brick comes from the symbol of resistance and the role bricks have played in populist uprisings, and sort of fits well into the car’s overall aesthetic, with its square-ish shape and the fact that the engine outputs a mind-numbing 900 horsepower!
Designer: Alexander Opanasenko for Sergei Kabargin
The Flying Brick comes 7 years in the making, from a mere napkin sketch to actual reality. Kabargin recruited his own team to build out his one-off hot rod fantasy, getting senior car designer Alexander Opanasenko on board to help fine-tune the design and build the renders we see here. The car’s references come from a variety of places, and it’s really difficult to pin-point the aesthetic language Kabargin and team were going for with this, but their brief was pretty simple – “the car must have its own character and personality.”
The body of the car is based on a monocoque made of aluminum and carbon fiber, clocking in at 1200 kilograms (2645 lbs), and will be outfitted with a MAST LS7 supercharged engine capable of 900 horsepower. The car’s overall body adds to the theme of dominance with aggressive surfacing that exposes the car’s elements like superchargers that pop out of the hood, and exhausts emerging from the front quite typical of hot rods.
There’s a fair amount of retrofuturism with the Flying Brick – starting with its interplay between the vintage aesthetic and the use of carbon fiber. The car’s details are decidedly antique-inspired, but the headlights are quite certainly modern. There’s also a unique interplay between luxury and brutish aggression, which ties in wonderfully with the Shelby theme Kabargin and team were going for. I doubt if Tommy would particularly care about the exaggerated front bumper or the somewhat out-of-place spoiler on the rear, but that boot looks big enough to store your entire weapon arsenal… or perhaps a few unlucky suspects and victims!
Kabargin and team are apparently hard at work, realizing the Flying Brick as a one-off automobile. It’s unclear what the car’s timelines are, what its interiors look like, and how its performance stacks up, but given Kabargin’s enthusiasm for sitting behind the wheel, we can rest assured that this hot rod isn’t going to spend most of its time in a garage!
