What on Earth is the Gillet Vertigo?

when we think of countries famous for making cars the list is actually quite long many countries have been home to successful Automotive companies but when you try to think of countries famous for making performance cars that list begins to shrink those that may immediately come to mind might be Italy Germany Sweden Etc I'd bet that Belgium makes it onto neither list for well anyone not unless you're Belgian anyway hello to any Belgian viewers thanks for stopping by that could be to do with the

fact that very few cars come out of Belgium except that isn't true at all I've got a Belgian government Business Report here that says in 2008 granted it was a little while ago but it's what I've got 724 498 Vehicles were produced in Belgium I believe the business term for that is a ton so why are we not all driving Belgian cars well you might be if you drive an opal Audi Volvo or Ford but of course none of these are actually Belgian companies it would appear that despite being a huge Vehicle Ma

nufacturer and exporter Belgium is home to very few homegrown car companies and certainly none you've ever heard of except maybe gay gay is a Belgian car manufacturer known almost exclusively for the vertigo an oddl looking sports car that gay describes as a quote Supercar and work of art pure pleasure yeah that's taken straight from the website speaking of their website is pretty sparse but I suppose that's to be expected they only make one car but do they well yes yes they do but that's not qu

ite the whole story gay seems to have focused their business around collaboration with other companies in the industry yes they work with clients to build the vertigo each car is built to order but they've also done semi bespoke work for companies including alfha Romeo and the famous gato Design House in fact perhaps there is an argument to be made that Belgium's most famous car is actually the 20110 alfha Romeo tz3 corser Alpha Romeo handed development of the tz3 corser to zagato and zato being

primarily a design house needed to Source everything that wasn't made of leather or red paint so they approached gay of course given that g make just one car what zagato received back was in fact the engine and the chassis from a vertigo a car originally developed in 1992 and so as simply as that the gay vertigo found itself as the backbone and the Heart of one of the rarest Italian flagships of this Century even to me a person who knew a little bit about the tz3 quarter before making this vide

o this seemed surprising most of the coverage at the time Drew comparison between it and the comparably mass Market HC with many outlets claiming that it was in fact a rebodied AC SE which let's be honest would make a hell of a lot more sense but no Under the Skin it was indeed a vertigo another Italian Rarity based on the vertigo is the zagato mro a tribute to Maserati on their cenery like the tz3 corser the mro used both the engine and Chassis from the vertigo clearly Zagat have a bit of a sof

t spot for them what I find interesting about these examples is there's truly no coverage of Gay's involvement in these iconic projects while reading an article on Top Gear about the mro they suggested that the chassis actually came from McLaren but that they couldn't confirm this I don't know how they got that and I don't know why they wrote it lazy writing maybe I've got no idea what I do know is it's a damn good job gay wasn't hired to design the bodies of those cars as well while the mro may

have taken some inspiration from the vertigo in terms of its exterior design they made sure to make it look nice the vertigo in all its iterations looks to my eye at least pretty hideous that being said the car has been around and available to order apparently for over 30 years so there must be some people who don't care what it looks like and just want one for its performance or more likely given the fact it's a rare bespoke Road car it's Rarity while it may not be a thing of beauty from the o

utside the car does have quite the engine the newest incarnation of the car post 2011 uses a Ferrari derived 4.2 L V8 from Maserati producing just over 420 brake horsepower giving around 430 is brake horsepower per ton of course as anyone who has heard about this car before today knows this car wasn't famous as a rare Road car or as the backbone to some Italian museum piece but as a race car just a quick warning information about this car is sparse and much of it is incomplete some of the race h

istory information comes from Gay's website which seems to have been run through Google translate and a Wikipedia article wherein the entire racing section is totally unreferenced there are a couple of decrepit websites offering tables of race data but none of them have any data for the years in which gay claims to have won so enough of that how well did it do well if you ask gay very very well the vertigo is a triple FIA GT world champion winning in class G2 in 2006 2007 and in 2008 for a car t

o have been Racing for 14 years before achieving its first win the team of gay must have been pretty set on making it work so impressive rively they did though I have seen it suggested that the G2 class the car won in for those 3 years wasn't particularly Popular by which I mean G ran in the class by themselves which paints their claims of world champion in a slightly different light I will say this has proven difficult to fact check either way with information being spotty it's likely that the

vertigo ran in the G2 class because for whatever reason it couldn't qualify for the GT classes probably something to do with homologation the unreferenced Wikipedia article offers very little extra information for us here but it does say that for all those three years that gay claims to have won it entered the 24 hours of spa and failed to finish every single time so what on Earth was the gay vertigo well in all likelihood the vertigo was a dardes vehicle with Tony Chile starting his business by

importing Lotus sevens I can't confirm for certain that the vertigo is derived from this platform but let's be real it's pretty likely the vertigo has existed through many iterations but as with so much of the information around this car I can't verify everything that I'm about to say so take it with a grain of salt what I know is that the most recent generation the five is ostensibly available to buy and should be pretty similar to the car that raced in the late 2000s it boasts a 4.2 L Maserat

i V8 and a carbon fiber honeycomb chassis apparently whether you could actually order one of these in practice I have no idea if you know any more than I do I'd love to hear about it in the comments section the previous generation of the car presumably called the vertigo 4 was outfitted with an Alpha Romeo derived V6 and the Very earliest cars this car has been around since the early 1990s were powered by a 2 L inline 4 cylinder Cosworth engine if you've stuck with me to this point you might be

wondering how I can claim that this deeply obscure car that seemingly nobody knows anything about can possibly be Belgium's most famous car if that's you you mustn't have played Gran Turismo because Gran Turismo is why this car is famous particularly thanks to its prevalence in Gran Turismo 3 and four much like this watch my video about the penos esperante GTR 1 on screen now leave a like if you enjoyed today's video and until next time goodbye