2006 Four Stroke Design Rumen

(from Four Stroke Design website)  The very beginning of Four Stroke dates back to long before Four Stroke was founded. In the early seventies, when Roumen Antonov, inspired by the Bugatti Type 57 that he loved so much, started drawing a car. After several sketches and drawings Roumen made a scale model. Years went on and Roumen managed to escape from communist Bulgaria to Western Europe where he worked on the development of Automatic Transmissions. In his free hours he started working on a 1:1 scale model his car.

In 1998 his workshop moved to Le Mesnil-Amelot, near Paris - Charles de Gaulle airport. Here the project was continued. During that time Roumen created the company "Four Stroke" around his project. The mockup in 1:1 scale was ready just before the 2002 Paris Motorshow where it was shown to the public. The interest from the press and the public for the car was enormous.

Since 2002 the efforts around the project were mainly focussed in getting the good conditions together in order to continue the project: funding, a development team, production facilities and a sales network. Several entrepreneurs proposed to be inporter in the UK and in the USA and even proposed to take quite impressive numbers of cars. In 2004 several companies were prospected to do the development work (Antonov himself basically concentrates on the development of automatic transmissions) and Technical Studio was chosen to take on the development.

During 2005 the design for series production has continued and is presented in its final shape on the Frankfurt Motorshow in September 2005. The car is equipped with modern technology but finds its inspiration in the designs and production philosophy of the cars of the nineteen thirties. The car has been named "Rumen".