The first of just 77 Brabus Bodos has been delivered, and it is a rolling tribute to a founder
Some cars are a statement, this one is a memorial with 1,000 hp
Brabus has spent decades turning fast cars into faster, wilder ones, but the Bodo is different, and now the first customer example has arrived. It has been delivered in Dubai, fittingly, and it is not just another 1,000 hp flex. This is the German tuner's most personal creation, a rolling tribute to the man whose name it wears.
A car named after a founder
The Bodo is named for Bodo Buschmann, the late founder of Brabus, and everything about it is designed to honour him. Production is capped at just 77 cars, a nod to 1977, the year he founded the company in Bottrop, and a discreet 77 logo sits beneath the rear window to make the point. This first customer car marks the moment that tribute stops being a show piece and starts reaching the people who bought into it.
The hardware
The specification lives up to the sentiment. The Bodo is a carbon-bodied GT built around a hand-assembled 5.2-litre twin-turbo V12 producing 1,000 hp and around 1,200 Nm of torque. That is enough to fire it from 0 to 100 km/h in a flat 3.0 seconds and on to a top speed of 360 km/h, hypercar territory by any measure. In an era when the V12 is being legislated and downsized out of existence, a brand-new, hand-built twelve-cylinder like this feels like a defiant celebration of the old ways.
Delivered and immediately wrapped
The first car went to an owner in Dubai, the natural home for exactly this kind of rare, extravagant machine, and it was immediately given full paint protection film to preserve the carbon bodywork and paint. It is the sort of car that will likely be cherished and barely driven, a collector's piece as much as a driver's, which is only appropriate for something built in such tiny numbers as a monument to the man who started it all.
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There is something genuinely moving about a company memorialising its founder not with a plaque or a foundation, but with the most extreme car it has ever built. The Bodo could easily have been just another Dubai-bound megabuck GT, and to some eyes it still is. But the detail of it, 77 cars for 1977, the founder's name on the boot, a hand-built V12 at a time when nobody has to build one anymore, lifts it into something with real meaning behind the horsepower.
Whether a 1,000 hp carbon hyper-GT is your idea of good taste is beside the point. This is Brabus being unmistakably Brabus, loud, excessive and a little bit mad, and pouring all of that into a farewell to the person who made the brand what it is. The first owner in Dubai now has a car that is quick enough to embarrass most supercars and personal enough to mean something, and 76 more people will soon share the sentiment. As tributes go, it is a spectacular one.
