The Oilstainlab HF-11 Is A Hypercar With Swappable Powertrains

Oilstainlab is a relatively new name in the automotive world, but it’s made a big impact over the last couple of years with its Half-11, a one-off, mid-engined special made from a hacked-up Porsche 911. That’s spent the last couple of years generating vast amounts of Instagram likes, but now, the Californian company – founded by twin brothers Nikita and Iliya Bridan – has gone one step further, because there’s a production version.

It’s the HF-11, and ‘production’ is used in its vaguest sense. Only 25 of these wild-looking machines will be built, starting at around £1.4 million a piece. So, yes, it’s another rich person’s plaything that you’ll seldom get a chance to even see, let alone experience, but that’s beside the point. The engineering in this thing is utterly astonishing.

Based around a bespoke carbon monocoque, it promises space for occupants up to 6’ 3” tall, even with a helmet, and a sub-tonne kerb weight regardless of powertrain choice.

Yes, there are multiple powertrains available, and they should placate both sides of the great automotive debate that currently rages. There are two flat-six engine options – whether they’re totally new or built up from something existing, we don’t know, but one is a 4.6-litre with 600bhp, and the other a 5.0-litre with a brutal 1200bhp. What’s more, the more powerful engine also promises a screaming 12,000rpm redline. A flat-six that revs as high as a GMA T50’s V12 should sound like nothing else we’ve ever heard. Even the ‘lesser’ flat-six tops out at 9000rpm.

On the other side of the page is an all-electric drivetrain. Reportedly, Oilstainlab is looking at a roughly 800bhp output from this. What fascinates us the most, though, is the HF-11’s Thunder-Volt system, which will apparently allow these powertrains to be quickly swapped around.

So, theoretically, you can pootle (if it’s possible to pootle in something with 800bhp) to a track day on electric power, then hammer around burning fuel in that quest for 12,000rpm, before nipping silently home again. Sounds like an ideal solution to us. Oh, and regardless of what powertrain’s fitted, you get a choice of a six-speed manual or seven-speed sequential ’box.

The body itself is full carbon-fibre, and the suspension is an all-round inboard pushrod setup with aluminium uprights. It’ll apparently produce 589kg of downforce at 150mph. Performance figures, meanwhile, are yet to be confirmed.

We’ve really not seen much else like it, and Oilstainlab itself seems to recognise this because it namechecks three cars as key competitors: the Porsche Carrera GT, GMA T50, and the Sauber C9 – the latter being a fully-fledged Group C Le Mans racer.

Co-founder Iliya Bridan says of the car: “Five years ago, we knew to define our future we needed to build our past, the Half-11 Prototype—a vehicle that would defy reality. It became a myth, our time machine. In the years since, we have distilled that vision of nostalgia, driven ourselves half-mad in technology and engineering. And finally, today we are proud to reveal our maniacal HF-11 to the world.”

That’s about all we know for now, but we’d expect more information to trickle out between now and the first planned customer deliveries in 2026.