Rimac Nevera R: What Founder Access Adds to 2,107 HP

October coverage described Mate Rimac personally handing over a Nevera R at the company’s factory in Croatia. He founded the company in 2009, starting in a garage, and now also runs Bugatti Rimac. That detail, drawn from the owner’s own posts and the coverage that followed, is what makes this delivery more than a photo gallery.

Some outlets called it the first Nevera R ever delivered. That description conflicts with Rimac’s published delivery timeline, which says customer deliveries began in late 2025 and records a Founder’s Edition handover at St. Moritz in January.

So the interesting question isn’t whether this car was first. It’s what an owner gets when the person who built the company is standing next to the car. The answer starts with the engineering.

What the R changes

Rimac rates the Nevera R at 2,107 hp, delivered through four motors, one for each wheel. Its torque figure, 2,340 Nm (1,726 lb-ft), is the same number Rimac lists for the standard Nevera. The R’s changes extend beyond its higher power output.

Simplified Rimac Nevera R four-motor schematic: a top-down layout with one motor at each wheel, a central battery pack and a control unit linked to all four motors. Illustrative bars, not measured data, show torque varying from wheel to wheel. Labeled: simplified schematic, not to scale. — Simplified four-motor layout illustrating the Nevera R’s independently controlled wheel torque. Torque bars are illustrative—not measured values. Graphic: Exotic Car News.

A smaller battery. The R uses a next-generation 108-kWh pack, where Rimac lists 120 kWh for the standard Nevera. The company says the new pack delivers more power, more efficiently, in a lighter package. Its model page doesn’t put a number on the weight saving.

More downforce and grip. A fixed rear wing, reworked intakes and a larger diffuser add 15 percent more downforce and improve aerodynamic efficiency by 10 percent, according to Rimac. New Michelin Cup 2 tires, it says, cut understeer by 10 percent and add 5 percent lateral grip. Rimac’s combined result is a lap of the Nardò handling track 3.8 seconds quicker.

Torque vectoring, recalibrated. With a motor at each wheel, the car can vary how hard each tire is driven, left to right and front to rear. Rimac says its All-Wheel Torque Vectoring system recalculates that split 100 times per second and was retuned for the new tires. In plain terms, it uses drive to help the car turn, not just to push it forward. New EVO2 carbon-ceramic brakes handle the stopping.

In July 2025 validation runs, completed in the car’s high-speed mode and independently verified by the instrumentation firm Dewesoft, Rimac recorded 0–60 mph in 1.66 seconds. The release doesn’t say whether that time uses the one-foot rollout common in U.S. testing. ECN has not driven the Nevera R; the figures here are Rimac’s.

What meeting the maker adds

A specification sheet tells you what a car can do. It can’t tell you why the car exists, or what it took to build.

Rimac’s own telling begins with a broken BMW, a garage and a group of people in their twenties who had never built a car. In a film the company released in March, Mate Rimac called the Nevera a “Mount Everest of blood, sweat and tears.” Meeting the founder beside the finished car can give that development story a personal dimension.

A handover like this can give an owner what the spec sheet can’t. The decisions explained by someone who made them. Faces attached to the hardware. A memory tied to the machine for as long as they own it.

We don’t know why this buyer ordered a Nevera R, and won’t guess. The power figure tells us about capability. It tells us much less about the experience of ownership. ECN has argued that the supercar horsepower war is giving way to a contest over emotion, and the Nevera R is a useful test of that idea.

Where access becomes the product

Rimac has packaged that idea, explicitly, in a separate program.

The ten-car Founder’s Edition program was announced within an originally planned run of 40 Nevera Rs. Rimac says all ten were allocated within a week of being privately offered. Each Founder’s Edition owner, according to Rimac, starts with a configuration session at its Zagreb campus, working directly with Mate Rimac, design director Frank Heyl and the design team. Rimac says Mate personally oversees the delivery of all ten.

The program continues after delivery. For Founder’s Edition owners, Rimac lists priority invitations to product previews, a company card for direct access to Bugatti Rimac headquarters, invitations to performance showcases and record runs, involvement in strategy discussions with the leadership team, and input into future research and development. At the first handover, Mate described it as a car offering customers “more access into our world than ever before.”

Those benefits belong to the Founder’s Edition. Rimac hasn’t said whether the car in the October coverage is one of the ten, and nothing it has published says standard Nevera R buyers receive the same package. “Strategy discussions” and “input” also describe conversations, not shares or votes; Rimac describes no equity or decision-making rights.

For the ten Founder’s Edition customers, then, Rimac treats access to its founder and engineers as part of what the car is.

Can the owner use what the engineers built?

A car’s outer limits and its everyday character are two different questions. Rimac’s model page lists the Nevera R’s maximum speed as 430 km/h (267 mph) with manufacturer oversight; its July 2025 record run reached 431.45 km/h (268.2 mph). That qualifier applies to top speed. Rimac doesn’t attach it to the car’s other capabilities, and Mate Rimac has said the R keeps much of the comfort and practicality that make the Nevera a usable daily car.

Where Rimac does describe instruction, it is tied to the Founder’s Edition. Those owners receive specialist driver training from Rimac’s professional testing team, the people who covered tens of thousands of miles developing the Nevera and Nevera R.

Training like that can deepen an owner’s feel for what the engineers built, on a closed course and under professional guidance. It doesn’t turn 2,107 hp into a public-road proposition. Rimac hasn’t publicly detailed what instruction, if any, comes with a standard Nevera R.

The part that lasts

Ten years from now, what will this owner remember? Perhaps 1.66 seconds. Perhaps a first lap on a closed circuit. Perhaps the opportunity to meet the person whose name is on the car.

For plenty of enthusiasts the engineering is the whole point, and that’s a perfectly good reason to want one. Records get beaten, though; the original Nevera’s fell to its own successor. A story about how a car came to exist tends to stay with its owner.

Horsepower proved Rimac could build the Nevera R. A handover like this one asks the owner to remember who did.