As strange as it seems now, in an age when every vaporware supercar trots itself onto the internet with grand fanfare, there was a time when these automobiles were practically a secret. And if they weren?t secret, they were certainly myth. Even heavyweights like Lamborghini and Ferrari didn?t produce as many cars as they do today, and the only way to find out about something like the Isdera Imperator 108i was to catch a blurb about it in the front pages of an enthusiast magazine or a classified ad in the duPont Registry.

When our sister publication Road & Track hauled a grip of supercars out to Volkswagen?s Ehra-Lessien course in 1987, among them was the Isdera Imperator 108i. And even among machines like the Lamborghini Countach 5000QV and Alois Ruf?s now legendary CTR Yellowbird, the Imperator, with its periscope rearview mirror and its Mercedes powerplant, stood out. The fact that it wasn?t actually a brand-new thing, but rather had its roots in the Mercedes-derived CW311, didn?t matter. It was easily as supercar chic as the Lamborghini or the never-really-produced Vector W2, both staples of boys? bedroom walls of the time. In the supercar world, time moved a little slower back then. The Lambo had its roots in the early 1970s, the Vector first appeared in 1980, and the Imperator could trace its lineage back to 1972, when former Porsche and Mercedes engineer Eberhard Schulz got together with Rainer Buchmann to develop the CW311. It was built largely of components fr...