Twin-Engined VW Lupo With 1,800 HP Is The Ultimate Franken-Car

Taking the concept of a pocket rocket to a whole new level.

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Adrian Padeanu

By: Adrian Padeanu

Oct 3, 2019 at 2:28am ET

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Before the Fox and the more recent up!, the pint-sized Lupo served as Volkswagen’s smallest car in the lineup. It was offered with a couple of three-cylinder diesel engines and a few four-cylinder gasoline units, topping out with a mighty 1.6-liter rated at 123 horsepower for the forgotten Lupo GTI hot hatch. The car you’re seeing here is far from being a standard version of the city car as it has been transformed into a little monster with more power than a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+.

Modified by the talented team at DOP Motorsport from Romania, this Lupo eschews whatever tiny engine it had to make room in the engine bay for a 2.0 TFSI sourced from a Golf R and upgraded to extract more power – 900 hp. In the tuning realm, it’s not all that uncommon for a modified car to get the engine of a much larger model, but there’s more to this remarkably wide Lupo.

Gallery: Twin-engined VW Lupo

Indeed there is. Behind the driver, there’s another 2.0 TFSI from a Golf R, and each engine is hooked up to a separate DSG. These gearboxes send power independently to the front and rear axles, thus effectively creating an all-wheel-drive layout with a combined output believed to be in the region of 1,800 horsepower. At around the 2:35 mark, you can see the driver using two gear levers to manage the pair of DQ250 transmissions in charge of putting the absurd amount of power to those black wheels wrapped in radial tires.

Footage shot in U.K. at the Santa Pod Raceway shows the driver having a difficult time maintaining control of the twin-engined Lupo, which did the quarter-mile in 9.22 seconds at 161 mph (259 km/h) in its best run. In case you haven’t noticed, the diminutive hatch has the tendency to veer off to the left, so there’s still work that needs to be done as the engineers are likely trying to find a way to put the immense power to the wheels in a more efficient and less dangerous way.