Where better to showcase a $6.7 million hypercar than the Monaco Grand Prix? The principality’s yacht-jammed harbor practically overflows with liquid assets during the race weekend, making it one of the few places on earth where such an astronomical price tag can start to be normalized.

From whichever angle you look at it, though, there’s nothing normal about Red Bull’s RB17. Taking pride of place on the Formula 1 team’s floating hospitality unit in the Monaco harbor this year, the showcar’s pearlescent white bodywork turned more heads in five minutes than a tennis ball over a five-set match at Roland-Garros.

Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT), the non-F1 arm of the wider engineering company, plans to sell 50 RB17s in total — a number of which are still up for grabs. Although the starting price hovers at $6.7 million depending on the dollar’s value versus the British pound, personalization of the car could see that number spiral well north of $7 million. Even among the haves and have-yachts circulating in Monte Carlo on race weekend, that’s a lot of money for a car.

So what will you get in return? For starters, no license plates. This car is track only, meaning it is not road legal and will complete almost all of its miles on race circuits around the world. But when you’re the proud owner of an RB17 on one of those fast, flowing circuits, Red Bull says the car will be capable of matching F1 car levels of performance.

That seems like a bold claim — until you consider its source. The RB17 is the brainchild of Adrian Newey, Formula 1’s most revered aerodynamicist and one of the most important minds behind Red Bull’s 15 titles to date. Newey claims he conceived the idea of RB17 during his downtime over the Christmas of 2020, and he remains committed to seeing the project to its completion despite leaving the company for F1 rivals Aston Martin last year.

Developed using the same tools that crafted Max Verstappen’s last four title-winning F1 cars, the hypercar has already logged some promising numbers in the simulation world. RBAT technical director Rob Gray, who has overseen the project from the first pencil strokes on Newey’s drawing board, adds some caution to the F1 lap time claim but maintains it is still realistic.

“I’m always quite cautious when I talk about this, but in the virtual world and in the simulator, we’re matching F1 lap times,” Gray told ESPN in Monaco. “But as I say, that’s virtually, so there’s a lot of assumptions going into that modeling.

“The guys won’t thank me for saying that, but there are a lot of assumptions, so the proof of the pudding will be when it gets onto the track. But we certainly think we’re there or thereabouts.”

Unlike its F1 cousins built out of the same factory in Milton Keynes, the RB17 does not have to comply to any rulebooks, making mind-bending performance easier to engineer. And by being a track-only car, there’s no consideration for the various government legislation that would be required to make it road legal — a crucial point of difference with Newey’s last hypercar project, the Aston Matin Valkyrie.

But there were still some limiting factors guiding Newey’s pencil, including the safety of driver and passenger in the narrow two-up cockpit.

“We had to decide what to do in terms of safety,” Gray explained. “So we did actually decide to build it to Le Mans Hypercar regulations from a safety perspective, because it just felt like the responsible thing to do, and it stops us from chipping away at that safety in the pursuit of performance. So that’s the safety side.

“And then I think probably the biggest challenge is tires. Michelin are doing a great job of developing the tire for the car, but actually, fundamentally, keeping the loads within what the tires can handle is the main challenge.”

The RB17 produces so much downforce that over a certain speed its active bodywork adjusts to trim some of it away.

“Downforce is somewhere around 1.5 tons,” Gray added. “And the thing is with the downforce is we have too much of it as the speed goes up, so we have to back the wings off and back the diffuser off to limit the amount of downforce, because otherwise we just overload the tires. So, we could have much more downforce, but we have to limit it where the tires can cope.”

Because the car is ultimately designed to be sold rather than raced, consideration was given to aesthetics as well as performance. Newey has described RB17 as “a work of art” that customers should be happy to display in their house — and it’s a possibility that some of the 50 cars will become nothing more than a museum pieces among the world’s most exotic car collections.

“I’m pleasantly surprised by how well we’ve managed to meld the styling side of it with the aero side of it,” Gray said. “Having worked with Adrian in F1, we’d never had any concept of styling, because you just don’t on the Formula 1 car. But I think the fact that we’ve been able to incorporate, to make it both aerodynamically very efficient but also beautiful is a real achievement.

“We’ve done that by having the styling guys working really closely with the aero guys. So the aero guys designed their shapes and then we then gave that to the stylists, they put their interpretation on it and then we check that again in the aero world. You go around this iterative process to get something that both looks great and is doing the job it needs to do.”

Along with active aerodynamics, the RB17 also has active suspension and can be tuned to allow drivers with a wide variety of skill levels to find their comfort zone behind the wheel. Tire supplier Michelin will also provide customers with different compounds for different conditions, including treaded wets, slicks and a “confidential” tire for ultimate, F1-level lap times.

“There’ll be the standard slick tire that you can buy and you can have on the car at home,” Gray said. “And then there’ll be the super, super fast tire — the confidential tire — that you can only run if Michelin are present. They won’t let you keep them, but that gives you the extra few seconds alone.”

It’s those extra few seconds of lap time that promise to etch the lines of the RB17 in the collective minds of car enthusiasts for decades to come. And if there’s one record that would truly set the RB17 apart, it’s that of the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

The 12.9-mile circuit in Germany’s Eifel mountains has long been considered the ultimate test of car and driver, to the extent that it recently attracted Verstappen (under the alias Franz Hermann) during one of his non-F1 racing weekends. Taking part in a test day, Verstappen set an unofficial GT3 lap record during his visit and has talked about his desire to race at the circuit when his calendar allows.

After F1 cars stopped racing at the Nordschleife in 1976, the outright lap record was taken in 1983 by Stefan Bellof’s 6:11.13 qualifying lap in a Porsche 956 for the 1000 Kilometers of the Nürburgring. It stood for more than three decades until Porsche returned to the ‘Ring in 2018 with an adapted version of its 919 Hybrid LMP1 car and clocked a 5:19.546 with Timo Bernhard behind the wheel.

A modern F1 car with its low ride and stiff suspension would likely struggle to find an effective setup over the Nordschleife’s bumps and undulations, but the RB17, with its F1 levels of performance and active suspension, could prove to be the perfect Nürburgring weapon.

“I think it will be very competitive,” Gray said when asked if the Nürburgring lap record is on Red Bull’s radar. “I mean, it’s not something we really focus on at the moment, but there’s certainly a certain driver who seems to be very interested in that! So who knows?”

Over to you, Franz Hermann.