Rimac Nevera Helps Dario Costa Land on a Moving Train
When Red Bull athlete Dario Costa landed on top of a moving cargo train travelling at 120 km/h, he became the first pilot in aviation history to land a plane on a moving train and take off from it again. Months of careful preparation made that world first possible. Rimac placed the Nevera R and Nevera hypercars at the centre of that training programme.
Costa completed the project on 15 February 2026 on a 2.5 km railway track in Afyonkarahisar, Türkiye. He had to approach a moving train container at a near-stall speed of just 87 km/h. He also had to manage severe wake turbulence, track a target that disappeared on approach, and land and take off again within a 50-second window. He had no margin for error. He also had no precedent.
Rimac worked with Costa on a three-day test programme at Pula Airport in Croatia. The team used the Rimac Nevera R and the Rimac Nevera as high-precision moving reference platforms. Those hypercars gave Costa a real moving surface that let him rehearse the mental and physical demands of landing almost blind on a moving target.
At speeds that closely matched the real landing approach, the hypercars helped Costa train speed synchronisation, alignment judgement and reaction timing.
Mate Rimac, Founder and President of the Rimac Group and CEO of Bugatti Rimac, said: "This project is the perfect expression of what Rimac stands for. Dario needed to train something that had never been done before, which meant there was no established method and no existing solution. Our hypercars gave him a real, moving, high-speed reference point; something only a handful of vehicles on the planet could provide at that precision and speed. When you are pushing into completely unknown territory, you need tools that match your ambition. We were proud to be part of that."
Rimac supported the project with more than the vehicles. The company’s engineering team drew on its expertise in composite structures and precision ergonomics from the Nevera programme. The team then designed and produced a fully custom-fitted seat for Costa from scratch to fit the extremely limited space inside his aircraft cockpit.
The team moulded the seat precisely to Costa’s body shape and calibrated it to meet his performance requirements for maximum stability, optimal control feedback and lower fatigue during extreme manoeuvres. In a discipline that demands pilot input within fractions of a second, that seat marked a meaningful engineering contribution. As far as Rimac knows, it also marked the first use of this level of precision seat engineering in a race aircraft.
Rimac engineers are also working with Costa on aerodynamic optimisation of his aircraft canopy, leveraging the company’s CFD expertise. That collaboration will continue into his upcoming projects.
Roni Kert, Head of Sales and Marketing at Bugatti Rimac, said: "Red Bull and Rimac share the same spirit of pushing boundaries and exploring the impossible. This project was another bold idea born from that shared mindset, and a chance to do something truly unprecedented. At Rimac, innovation and performance are part of our DNA, so we were thrilled to collaborate with Red Bull by supporting Dario Costa during the preparation phase and contributing our technical expertise to elevate the project."
