GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Glistening Glickenhaus SCG003

It's either madness or genius to look at the bustling, jostling, crowded top end of the supercar market and think you can do it better.

James Glickenhaus's entire career, from writing, directing and producing movies as a 20-year-old to the high stakes of Wall Street finance, has been spent walking that fine line, usually with success.

The American is hoping that run continues with his Italian-built, all-carbon SCG003 supercar, which is essentially a purpose-built, loophole-dodging GT3 racer for the road.

Glickenhaus is so confident in the speed of his twin-turbo V6 hypercar that he brushes off the threat posed by the Nurburgring times of cars like the McLaren F1 GTR, the 675LT, the Lamborghini Aventador SV or Porsche's 911 GT3 RS.

"It's faster than any production-based car in the world and on the road it's fast enough to get you incarcerated in any country in the world," the 64-year-old New York native insisted.

"This would blow a McLaren P1 GTR, or anything else like that, away on any track in the world, but that's not a slight on the McLaren. It's a completely different idea of a car.

"You can't compare a GT3 race car with a road car. It won't just do 6:45 on the full Nurburgring combined track, but it will do it for 24 hours straight," he boasted.

Well, you'd want it to do something special for the €2.3 million he is asking for the road car. Oddly, the full race version is only €2.1 million, but he says that's because it only comes with a bare spares package.

"If you're serious about going racing, you need the full spares package and that can easily cover another million. The race car comes with four wheels and tyres and we go racing with 40 per car, then you need spares for the gearbox, the panels, the splitter and it just goes on."

And he'd know. He took the SCG003's custom-built predecessor to race at the Nurburgring 24-hour race and he's going back there this year with a two-car team, headed by racer Marino Franchitti. And he's bringing them both to the Bathurst 12-Hour in 2016.

He's not under any illusions that he'll supplant Ferrari as the world's supercar maker of choice, even if it was Ferrari that gave him the impetus to create his own car company.

"Realistically, there would be no more than 10 or 12 of these ever made," he admitted.

"I just do it because I wanted to build an LMP car and drive it to Le Mans and then race it at Le Mans and then drive it home on the road. This can help to finance that."

He began making his own cars long before he commissioned Pininfarina to build his now-infamous P4/5 off the mechanical layout of his Ferrari Enzo. Ferrari tolerated that car, even allowing Glickenhaus to use its logo on the nose, but when he decided he'd like to race it, Ferrari stopped being so friendly. Even if Glickenhaus has more than US$30 million tied up in classic Ferraris, including the oldest Ferrari in existence (chassis number two).

"I've always liked Ferraris and I've always been modifying them. I had a Testarossa and you couldn't fit anything in the glovebox and it sometimes didn't go and a lot of it wasn't workable in daily life, so I kept redesigning things.

"In effect, building this car is just a continuation of that."

Yet that's not the whole story. Glickenhaus shunned the family Wall Street finance firm and, as a young kid, wrote and produced movies.

His credits include The Exterminator and Basket Case II and III.

"People talk and ask about my cars, but you have to remember they were all big gulps at the time.

"All of them were. After The Exterminator, I spent a lot of money on a car, but it was a big chunk of what I had. They kept appreciating in value, but that's not why I bought them.

"I moved into Wall Street when I got tired of getting actresses out of Winnebagoes coked up to their eyeballs at 2am. It's fun when you're 20 but not when you're 40."

So he moved to finance, belatedly, and after another couple of decades his wife pinned him down on what made him truly happy, which lead to P4/5, which then lead to the SCG003.

He now splits his time between his New York home and Torino, where he spends about 10 days a month working on the design, engineering and construction of his road and race cars.

At 4810mm, the SCG003 road car is covered by one big aerodynamic device that others would call a bodyshell. And it's built exactly, precisely to meet the FIA's GT3 rules, and nothing more.

Its engine is based off Honda's 3.5-litre, twin-turbo V6 race engine, which registers at exactly 3500cc. It has two intercoolers – one for each bank – and delivers 389.5kW of power and 700Nm of torque.

Glickenhaus insisted that the car be easy to drive quickly, which is why it's a relatively low-revving motor, with the power peaking at only 6800rpm and the torque maximum hitting at 4500rpm.

"It's just an easier car to drive fast if it's like that. It has the power, but you can live in the torque."

And, obviously, if that's not enough power, he will always sell you more. And more. The entire thing is so modular that the wheelbase can be adjusted to swallow a V12, if that's your preference.

Aside from the 73kg carbon-fibre tub, very little of the SCG003's carbon bits are bonded in. They are, instead, bolted in. That's a classic racing strategy to make it fast and easy to repair a crashed or broken car.

"You keep going back from the point of impact until you find out where the parts are still straight and you unbolt the first bent piece and replace everything from there," he said.

But that's not all. You can drive the SCG003 to the race track and then change some bits over to go racing. It's all very simple, according to Glickenhaus.

"We have the racing wing that you change over and the racing splitter and you can bolt in the roll cage to make it a homologated race car. The quick-lift jacks are built in to the road car, so you just need the bottle and the hose and you're done.

"The wheels are different sizes on the race car, but the overall circumference of the tyre is the same, so you just swap the wheels over and you're done."

The layout follows F1 and Le Mans-style philosophies of a carbon tub (with 35,000Nm per degree of torsional stiffness), the engine mounted directly to the tub's rear end, then a 1350 Hewland LWS sequential gearbox mounts to the rear of the engine. The rear end's double wishbone suspension, complete with pushrods and KW adjustable dampers, attaches directly to the gearbox.

The front end uses double wishbones as well and follows the same pushrod layout, while the wheels are centre-locking, just in case you hadn't picked up that the car was built around racing ideas.

Unlike most potential rivals, the SCG003 uses steel brake rotor, not carbon-ceramics, and they're big. The six-piston front calipers squash 378mm x 35mm ventilated front discs and the four-piston rear end governs the 355mm x 32mm ventilated rear discs.

It's 1995mm wide (though it edges out over two metres if you include the tyre width when the suspension is set up at its standard four degrees of negative camber).

It's only 1108mm high and it rides on a 2700mm wheelbase and before you get too enthusiastic about owning one as a road car, its ground clearance is just 60mm at the front and 85mm at the rear.

But they're nominal numbers only. Glickenhaus admits to a bit of dancing through the rulebook of the FIA here and there.

There are pinched rises atop each of the front wheel guards. The rules cite a minimum height for the front guards, he explained, but they don't say how much of the guard has to be that high, so they've put a sharp fin in the middle of the guard and lowered the rest of it for sleeker aerodynamics. It's the same with the roof fin, for exactly the same reason.

The aerodynamics are a key driver for most things on the SCG003, which is why it has a tiny cabin.

"We didn't have to make a cabin for two fat American burger munchers, so it has the smallest cabin it can legally have under the GT3 rules," Glickenhaus admitted.

"I am getting through a loophole here. It's a modern day Porsche GT1," he said, referring to the Le Mans-winning Porsche racer that killed off the Le Mans organisers' hopes of holding on to a production-car formula, due to Porsche's unfettered manipulation of the rulebook.

The cheeky fiddles don't stop there, either. The rules say the tyre and suspension can't be visible, but Glickenhaus says it's easier to drive and place the car if you can see them from the driver's seat. So they re-read the rule and found it was applicable in plan view, which the SCG003 complied with, but you can still see the tyre and suspension from the driver's seat.

You can see much more besides. The car has side mirrors, but only because the rules say it has to. Glickenhaus has positioned the mirror housing so high that they more or less can't be seen from the driver's seat and, instead, channel air onto the rear wing. The actual looking-backwards bit is covered by rear-facing cameras in the housings, which are displayed on either side of the instrument cluster.

It uses what Glickenhaus calls an on-demand digital instrument cluster, so it shows only revs, gears and speed (on the road car, at least) and only brings up other details like water or oil pressure and temperature when they're becoming a problem.