We see many cars being advertised as a street-legal race car, and most of those are ‘dialed-down’ versions of the cars we encounter on the race track, but the Praga R1R is different … the R1R is an actual race car. Praga just added the necessary items that allow this racer to be driven on the open road … so this is probably as close as you can get to an actual race car that is legal to drive on the public roads.
Praga might not ring a bell to must of us, but they based in the Czech Republic, and have been for over 100 years. Founded in 1907, they have been designing, developing and producing not only race cars, but also road cars, airplanes, trucks, buses, motorcycles and go-karts that have been sold worldwide.
The Praga R1R is the ultimate track day car, you can do lap after lap at top speed on the track on Sunday, and still drive it home without a trailer. This is true racing technology for the road, be it a twisting mountain road in the Swiss Alps or the avenue in Monaco, the R1R feels at home on all of them.
The R1R is actually the first road car Praga has built since 1947, and they took their race-winning R1 as a base to add the required technology to make it a road car. Safety equipment was added, but also a suspension specifically tuned for the public roads, all while retaining the racing heart of the original.
There was no need to make the Praga R1R feel like a race car, because it was a racer from the start, they just added a certain degree of comfort and made a race car cope with everyday road driving. The teardrop design of the cabin was created for optimum aerodynamics, and the entire design of the R1R, complete with that massive rear wing actually generates more down force over 200 km/h than the overall weight of the car. This means you could theoretically drive this car upside down in a tunnel, but more importantly it offers amazing cornering capabilities.
