Romain Grosjean on the new Praga Bohema Behind the wheel in the first road-legal, trackbiased supercar from the Czech Republic
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Magneto
“IF I HADN’T LOOKED DOWN and seen that I was wearing jeans, I wouldn’t have remembered I was in a road car, because it really behaves like a race car; more like a single-seater in fact, because there’s the aero and the downforce,” says IndyCar and former F1 racer Romain Grosjean, as he pulls up in the Bohema. “I was driving it thinking, ‘this could be a prototype, I could actually be testing to go to Le Mans’. And then you come into the pitlane and drive it away on the road. Amazing!” Grosjean has been testing the prototype Praga Bohema at Slovakia Ring, with me sat alongside him for some of the time. It’s the company’s brand-new, road-legal, track-biased supercar, an all-new design based around a composite monocoque,
modified Nissan GT-R engine and Hewland sequential transmission. It’s quite a thing. The company, named after – and traditionally based around – Prague, has its roots in a heavy-engineering firm of the late 1800s. It built its first cars in 1907, initially as licenced copies of Isotta Fraschinis, before developing its own models. After difficult times during the communist era of Czechoslovakia, the company started to recover – first in motocross, then karting and Dakar Rally trucks, and since 2012 in sportscar racing around the world with the championship-winning R1. Praga tried converting the R1 race car to road spec, resulting in the 2016 R1R, but the team wasn’t happy with the compromises needed. As
