Donkervoort D8 GTO-JD70 – Donkervoort celebrates its founder’s birthday with a high-powered gift of its own

The modern Dutch master turns 70 today and his Donkervoort Automobielen operation delivered in style with a super-light, ferociously fast tribute to pass on to both new customers and to car industry’s most loyal owner base.

Powered by an optimized version of the crushingly strong Audi Sport 2,5L five-cylinder turbocharged motor, the JD70 will weigh less than 700kg and will be suitable for both the road and the racetrack.

Performance figures for the JD70, which will start from €163.636,36, will be released closer to its planned spring, 2020 reveal. Only 70 JD70s will be built – one for each year of Joop’s life (so far).

Donkervoort tasked his team to develop the innovative JD70 at their Lelystad headquarters to honor the 41-year-old company’s founder, and it builds on Joop’s commitment to raw driving skill and unfiltered emotions.

The JD70 will be an evolution of the D8 GTO family, which took Donkervoort into a new stratosphere of supercar-killing performance and has spawned specialized race and track-day versions as well as more comfortable touring editions.

Like the D8 GTO, the JD70 will keep its weight below 700kg through Donkervoort’s lightweight EX-CORE® carbon-fiber technology, adjudged so clever it earned the company a European Union innovation grant.

EX-CORE® will not only make the JD70 astonishingly light, but immensely strong and fully compliant with the European Community’s Small Series type approval crash regulations. It’s also clean enough to comfortably pass the EU6D-temp emissions rules.