Pegassi Osiris

The Pegassi Osiris is not a car so much as a commission. Each one is assembled by a small team over a period of months, with the buyer specifying the weave direction of the visible carbon, the color of the stitching, the finish on every milled aluminium component in the cabin. The result costs roughly twice what any other exotic in Leonida does and looks, close up, less like a vehicle than a piece of aerospace hardware that somebody decided to upholster.

It is also genuinely, seriously fast, which is not always true of cars in this price bracket. The Osiris runs active aerodynamics - four independent flaps that adjust continuously under braking, cornering and acceleration - and the effect is a car that generates downforce when it needs it and sheds drag when it does not. On the long causeway runs it is as quick as anything in the state, and through a fast sweeper it plants itself in a way that feels almost artificial.

In Vice City the Osiris occupies a strange social position. It is too expensive to be a status car in the ordinary sense - there is no bragging value in a price nobody can conceptualise - and it is too beautiful to be treated as a tool. The handful of Osirises in Leonida spend most of their lives in climate-controlled garages, moved between properties on covered transporters, driven perhaps a dozen times a year on carefully chosen mornings when the roads are dry and the traffic is thin.

Which makes it all the more remarkable when one turns up somewhere it should not be. An Osiris parked outside a Port Gellhorn warehouse at four in the morning means something has gone badly wrong, or is about to. There are only so many of them, everybody knows who owns which one, and the car cannot be driven anywhere in the state without the fact being noted.

The Osiris is all compound curves and exposed structure. The body is a series of flowing carbon forms punctuated by functional openings, with a low domed cabin, gullwing doors that take a section of roof with them, and an intricate rear treatment where the bodywork is cut away entirely to expose the suspension and the quad centre-mounted exhaust.

The active aero elements sit at the four corners - small flaps that rise and fall visibly as the car works, giving the Osiris a quality of being alive that no fixed-wing supercar can match. Pegassi's engineers tuned the movement to be visible from outside the car, because at this price the customer is buying the spectacle as much as the physics.

The cabin is where the money is most obviously spent. Every switch is machined from solid aluminium and moves with a mechanical weight. The gearshift assembly is exposed through the centre console like a piece of watch movement. The instruments are individually finished dials rather than a screen. Buyers choose the leather from a book of hides and the carbon from a book of weaves, and no two cars in Leonida are specified alike.

The Osiris is fast everywhere. Top speed sits at the very top of the class thanks to the drag-shedding behaviour of the active aero at cruise, acceleration is savage without ever feeling unruly, and the all-wheel-drive system delivers power with a level of composure that flatters the driver considerably.

Cornering is where the aero earns its keep. Under load the flaps deploy asymmetrically to resist body roll and shift downforce toward the loaded side, which means the Osiris corners flat and turns in with an immediacy that a 1,450-kilogram car should not possess. The sensation is less like driving a heavy car well and more like driving a light car that happens to be very stable.

Braking is exceptional and made stranger by the air-brake function, where the rear flaps rise sharply under hard deceleration and physically push the tail down. The first time you use full braking in an Osiris the car pitches less than you expect and stops harder than you expect, and it takes a few attempts to recalibrate.

Driving an Osiris in Leonida is a tactical decision as much as a driving one. It is one of the fastest cars in the state and also one of the most identifiable, which means every minute it spends on a public road is a minute somebody could be describing it to somebody else. Use it for speed on routes where being recognised does not matter, and take something anonymous when it does.

Trust the aero. The active system means the car behaves differently at ninety than it does at forty, and the difference is in your favour - the Osiris is more stable, more planted and more willing to change direction at high speed than at moderate speed. Drivers who slow down for a fast sweeper are throwing away the car's best quality.

Use the air brake deliberately when you need to scrub a lot of speed quickly, such as a Keys bridge approach you have misjudged. Full brake application deploys the rear flaps and pins the tail, and the Osiris will haul itself down from a genuinely alarming speed in a distance that no other car in the class can match. It is the single best get-out-of-trouble tool in the Super category.

Rideout Customs will work on an Osiris but does so with a certain reluctance, because most of what the aftermarket sells would compromise a car whose aerodynamics were developed as a closed system. The shop's Osiris menu is deliberately restrained - paint and carbon finish work, a small selection of forged wheels, exhaust tips, and interior trim swaps.

Mechanical upgrades are available across engine, transmission, brakes and suspension, and the platform accepts them well, though the standard car is close enough to the limit of what the tires can use that the gains are modest. Armor is the one common request in Leonida, for obvious reasons, and the Osiris carries the additional mass better than its dry weight suggests. Bulletproof tires are practically standard equipment on the state's examples.

There is no Osiris showroom. Pegassi handles the model through a private client office above the downtown Vice City flagship, by appointment, with a build slot allocation that runs well over a year. The only Osiris regularly visible to the public is the display car in the flagship's upstairs room, which is not for sale.

In the world the car appears in a small number of very specific places: the gated estates on the mainland side of the bay, the private hangar aprons at the executive airfield, the top level of one or two downtown parking structures with dedicated secure bays, and - rarely, briefly, and always memorably - on Ocean Drive at an hour when somebody wants to be seen by exactly the right person.

Pegassi built the Osiris to prove that it could - a flagship intended less to sell in volume than to establish that the marque belonged in the same conversation as the hand-built specialists. The Leonida allocation was tiny from the outset, and the first cars went to buyers who had been on a list for two years before the model was announced.

Because there are so few, the Osiris has become a kind of index of the state's power structure. Every one is known. When an Osiris changes hands in Vice City, people notice, and the reasons are usually interesting - a debt settled, an operation absorbed, someone leaving the state in a hurry. More than one Leonida investigation has begun with a photograph of a distinctive car parked somewhere it had no business being.