When famed car designer Sasha Selipanov unveiled his own hypercar, the Nilu27, in August, several journalists asked about the name.
Nilu is a portmanteau of his daughters' names, Nica and Lucia, while the number 27 references something he saw as a child in wartorn Tbilisi.
In the winter of 1991, newly independent Georgia had erupted into civil war and 7-year-old Selipanov had witnessed the fighting up close.
"I remember that time very well," Selipanov said of sheltering with his family in their central Tbilisi apartment. "There was gunfire everywhere, and [the militants] burned down a couple of buildings in the neighborhood with my favorite ice-cream cafe going down in flames."
When the fighting became increasingly intense, Selipanov's grandfather arrived at their apartment. "He told my dad that we need to pack up and go." As the family sped out of the city center by car, Selipanov recalled, "we could see the bullets ricocheting on the street."
At his grandparents' apartment in the relatively safe north of Tbilisi, the boy began exploring his new home and discovered an old car magazine. He leafed through it until a photo stopped him in his tracks. It was a race car -- a red Ferrari with the number 27 on its nose.
For Selipanov, a love of Soviet warplanes had faded after seeing war up close. "I was feeling pretty bummed about everything and definitely not happy with seeing military in action," he said. The Ferrari represented something different.
The race car had the aggressive aesthetic of the Soviet Mig-29 and Su-27 fighter jets the boy loved, but "without the purpose of killing innocent civilians," he said. "I just thought the picture was amazing." From that moment, Selipanov became obsessed with cars, but in Georgia at the time the most exciting vehicle on the roads was the Soviet-made Lada Niva.
After the family moved to Russia in the early 1990s, Selipanov's parents started a food-import business, then a company selling packaged seafood. The family lived frugally enough to send Selipanov to the United States in 2001, where he studied at the ArtCenter design school in California.
After graduating, Selipanov landed a job at Volkswagen Group in Germany, where he honed his skills, but became increasingly frustrated with the restraints of corporate design.
Then came a lucky break.
Lamborghini asked if the Volkswagen design team in Germany could come up with an interior for their newest supercar. After begging his boss to be able to put forward a design for an exterior instead, Selipanov was grudgingly permitted. When the head of Volkswagen opened the folder of design sketches "he opened it from the wrong side."
Selipanov's design, of a wedge-shaped Lamborghini that looked like, "it wants to burn your village" was the first sketch the executive saw. He liked it.
Selipanov was sent to Lamborghini's headquarters in Sant'Agata, Italy, to join the Italian team working on a car that would become known as the Huracan.
In a recent podcast appearance, Selipanov becomes visibly emotional when he recounts arriving in the northern Italian town as a poorly paid designer. "All I could do is afford a bowl of mozzarella that I bought and a little carton of red wine." As he sat in the street with milk from the cheese dripping down his face he remembers, "touching the ground thinking like, holy s***, I made it, I'm at the mecca, the greats have walked these roads, like I get to do something cool."
For the first few days, the unknown young designer, whom no one from the Lamborgini team had asked for, endured "a couple of fairly blunt discussions, with fists on the table," he told RFE/RL.
But the soft-spoken Georgian says he and the Lamborghini team soon bonded over pizza and drinks and his own love of Italian culture. "They even in some ways reminded me of my Georgian background as well, just great, great guys."
Much of Selipanov's original sketch for the Huracan made it into the final production model and the car was a hit, selling tens of thousands of units.
Selipanov was then named the head of exterior design for the French hypercar company Bugatti. After the 2016 unveiling of the Bugatti Chiron, the Tbilisi-born car fanatic etched his name in the pantheon of great design.
The Chiron that Selipanov shaped has been described as "the ultimate car. Period." All 500 Bugatti Chirons produced, which cost more than $3 million each, have been sold since its launch. A video showing a Chiron breaking a world speed record has been viewed nearly 100 million times.
Selipanov's star rose still further in 2019, when he was named head of design at the Swedish hypercar manufacturer Koenigsegg.
After such a brilliant career, Selipanov's future could have been a smooth road, designing flagship hypercars for large companies with deep pockets. Instead, he has turned onto a riskier path. In 2023 Selipanov and his wife, Inna, launched their own car design studio, Hardline27. Then the couple unveiled the Nilu27.
The Nilu has received significant media buzz for its utilitarian aesthetics that toss out much of the computerization and visual fluff that pads many hypercars. Nilus will sell for $3.7 million per vehicle for the first 15 units, a price that suggests Selipanov may have put all his chips on the table to launch the hypercar.
Asked why he would pour his savings and countless hours into such an ambitious project, the 41-year-old points to his parents, who instilled in him an "almost morbid sense" of the value of every moment when he was growing up in Soviet Georgia. Both Sasha and his brother, Dmitry, a successful composer, were taught "that time is finite, and if you want to achieve something you can't just let the day go by without setting a target for yourself and achieving something meaningful on that day."
A day wasted, Selipanov said, "is the greatest crime you can commit against yourself."
