With due apologies to the New Zealand tourism board, if you want the full Lord of the Rings experience, you don’t need to go very far. Ten minutes outside Westport, the mountains are spectacularly misty as we pull up on a quiet hillside. All around is Shire-like; green and pleasant but down amid the trees there is a growling, snarling noise that bespeaks a monster.
Roaring with menace, and with a flash of blood red, it comes into view with a trail of flung mud and gravel behind it. It’s… actually kind of small. Photos don’t really do the cognitive dissonance of a Knine racing truck justice. Just as a Hyundai Ioniq 5 never gets any smaller, even when it’s far away the Knine never seems to actually get any bigger as it gets closer. There’s a visual similarity to Ford’s mighty F-150 Raptor pickup, but the Knine is like the pocket-sized version, barely coming up to my eyebrows as it comes to a stop.
American cars tend to look incongruous on Irish roads, but here the incongruity folds in on itself as the shape and styling scream, “‘Merica” at you, but the size just doesn’t add up. Time to find some explanations as to quite what this car is, and why it’s made in Mayo.
Ben Shakal, a native of Wisconsin, established Knine 10 years ago in Mayo. Why would anyone set up a company making off-road racing trucks, primarily for sale in the United States, in the misty, rainy west? “The truth is, it was almost entirely accidental,” says Shakal. “If you’d asked me from a business standpoint, could we build something like this in Ireland, I would probably have told you no – that’s probably a terrible idea. But, piece by piece, it just kind of came together.”
Shakal arrived in Ireland to work in the pharmaceutical industry, married a woman from west Cork and raised a family here. But the off-road racing bug had bitten him, and he wanted to set up his dream company without uprooting his family. Thus Knine was born in Westport, and that’s where it is currently building its trucks.
But what exactly is Knine building? Essentially, the product is known as a prerunner. Prerunner trucks are theoretically used to reconnoitre off-road racing routes ahead of the bigger, faster racing vehicles, but they’ve kind of become a thing in themselves, an entertaining way to head off into the boonies and go looking for fun.
Knine builds pretty much all of its trucks from scratch. At this stage, the only bought-in components are suspension units (the heavy-duty dampers come from off-road racing specialists Fox) and the engine and gearbox, which are taken from a Can-Am Maverick off-road buggy.
In spite of the chunky, square bonnet, the Knine is actually mid-engined. This one is running a tiny Rotax 1.0-litre turbo, three-cylinder engine. Suitably tuned and running on E85 bio-ethanol fuel, this dinky little engine can produce as much as 400hp, but for today’s purposes, and running on standard unleaded, it’s pumping out a more sedate 220hp. Still, that’s plenty in a car that weighs just 1,175kg.
That light weight is primarily thanks to Knine using carbon fibre for almost all of the truck’s panels. There’s not much in the way of carbon fibre expertise in Ireland, so Shakal had to basically build that expertise from scratch, establishing a close-knit team of budding composite body experts as he did so. “When we started this project,” he tells The Irish Times, “I figured I was maybe the smartest guy in that room. Now I’m not even close. It’s a terrific team. We took probably the better part of four years just figuring out how to make world-class composite parts. Once we had that down, we started by selling products that you could bolt on to other production vehicles, and then we took the next step and started making our own chassis.”
Aside from the mid-mounted motor, the Knine mechanical make-up is drool-worthy. “What really makes this car what it is, is the suspension and its ability to just fly over any terrain at 80, 90, even 100 miles per hour” says Shakal. “So we use massive Fox internal bypass shocks, and we have 2ft of suspension travel.” Yes, that’s 2ft. 24 inches. 600mm of suspension travel. That should cope with a pothole or two, aided by the coolest shock absorbers you’ve ever seen, complete with nitrogen gas reservoirs mounted on the external roll-over bar.
That suspension is computer controlled, and can separately stiffen or soften at the front or rear to prevent squat under acceleration or diving under braking. The whole rear end of the truck is basically one big fuel cell, with 240 litres of fuel in it (again, that’s not a typo) and a potential 1,600km range on one fill. “When you’re out in the desert, these things are meant to do really, really long, long rides. And you know, you might not have a fuel stop for a while. So this will ensure that it doesn’t leave you stranded,” says Shakal.
Inside is a racer’s cockpit. Two high-backed Recaro bucket seats with four-point racing harnesses, a tiny digital display flanked by a couple of simple gauges, a large LCD screen in the centre which isn’t for the infotainment system but for the rear-view camera, and a controller for the headsets. These, with integral microphones, are necessary because the Knine gets noisy inside. Shakal assures me that you can connect a music player to them by Bluetooth, so you don’t have to be without your tunes in the middle of the desert.
Right. Strap in. Switch on. Tug the selector for the CVT transmission back one notch to select drive. And go… With four-wheel drive, and chunky-treaded 33-inch BFGoodrich tyres, the Knine grips the forest floor and we’re soon rocketing along between the trees. The logging track road beneath is filled with muddy potholes and washboard lumps. You can drive it in a conventional car (we used a Toyota RAV4 as a camera car for this feature) but the conventional car has to slow down to allow for the nastier sections. The Knine just keeps going and going and just when you think you need to slow down, you can actually speed up because that remarkable suspension just glides over the worst obstacles in the way a Rolls-Royce makes speed bumps irrelevant.
The steering – controlled by a titchy Sabelt racing wheel with multiple buttons – is direct and fast, but the Knine manages not to feel nervous. It’s quick enough that the occasional squirrelly movement from the rear end is quickly caught and eliminated, but it also allows you to plug that squared-off nose into an early apex and put the power on pretty much as soon as you want to. Basically, if you think the Knine looks like fun, then it’s way more fun than that. It is every millimetre the full-sized radio-controlled car that it appears to be. No wonder off-road enthusiasts are already snapping these up, including Dakar Rally champion Nasser Al-Attiyah, who has bought two for his off-road racing ranch near Barcelona.
While it is quite loud in the cabin, and the headsets do definitely make talking easier to hear, it’s not actually that bad. Shakal has plans to create more luxurious models – he name-checks the Lamborghini Aventador and mentions acreages of leather and suede in the offing and shows me a rendering of a long-wheelbase, four-door version fitted with a 500hp V8 engine – but that seems like a bit of a stretch for this particular model, which in any case seems to be more suited to a plain and rugged cabin, the better to be able to hose off the mud. Perhaps the most luxurious part is actually the cabin sealing – an air conditioning system mounted in the nose actually keeps the inside at positive pressure, meaning that when you’re actually bouncing across the desert, sand doesn’t get blown in through the vents.
At circa €160,000 the Knine isn’t what you’d call cheap, but then again when you consider that it’s – effectively – a mid-engined, two-seat carbon-body off-road sports car perhaps that’s not quite so expensive. It’s not road legal in Ireland, ironically although it can be made road legal in most other countries.
Still, even if we can’t actually drive one on the road here, we can at least celebrate an Irish-American success story, right? Car production in Ireland has a spotty history, at best, but Shakal and his team have pulled off quite the coals to Newcastle coup by managing to sell off-road racing trucks to the US and Middle Eastern markets.
Well, yes but sadly not for much longer. “We looked, we tried, we did our best to try to keep as much production here in Ireland as possible,” Shakal says. ”Making something like this, to this quality standard, and this complexity, and the amount of like tech that goes into this, it’s kind of difficult to make anywhere. It’s not an easy thing to manufacture. And it’s exceptionally difficult to make here in Ireland.” Too difficult unfortunately. With a heavy heart, Shakal has decided that production of Knine’s trucks will move to his old home state of Wisconsin, starting from the end of January. It’s not all bad news for Mayo.
As Shakal says: “We will keep all the research and development work here. New cars will be imagined here and prototyped here. And we just have an incredibly talented team of about 10 people here in Ireland, and we have no intentions of backing off on that side of the business. There’s still a lot we can do here.”
There is a damning postscript to this. Shakal desperately wanted to keep Knine’s production in Ireland, but not only did Wisconsin roll out the business-friendly carpet for his company, he was actually told by an Enterprise Ireland representative that “we just don’t DO cars in Ireland…’
Well, we do for another few months, and then we won’t again.
