Customised Cars: In these times of bland, production line motors, many are seeking the holy grail of personalised cars. Barry McCall looks at the new craze
Readers of a certain age will remember Johnny Cash. Well, Johnny once had a hit about an auto worker who decided to build his own car from parts smuggled out of the factory in his lunchbox. Entitled One Piece at a Time the song finished with a fairly hilarious description of the end product which was a "59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64 . automobile". The ultimate in customised cars, a truly unique machine which was instantly recognisable by all who saw it.
And despite the fact that the car did not turn out exactly as intended, its owner was intensely proud of it. It is this search for true individuality which is bringing an increasing number of Irish people to customise their cars.
A recent indication of this growth in popularity was the Modified Car Show held in the RDS last March. Some 10,000 people attended this exhibition in just one day to view the 100 modified cars on show.
And the cars on show weren't simply vehicles with go-faster stripes added. The top prize at the show was awarded to a VW Golf owned by Sean O'Dwyer. And this was no ordinary Golf. This machine has had so much work done to it that is now worth €80,000. It has a restyled body, new lights, leather interiors, and five TVs among other things.
Exhibition promoter Richard Lavin is a living example of how popular car modifying has become in Ireland, in that his hobby has now become his living. "We started the show three years ago in Tramore and it has now outgrown the town," he says. "We needed a bigger venue to cater for the crowds we were attracting so we chose the RDS for this year's show.
"We started a company, Xtreme Promotions, to run the show in the RDS and I had so much confidence in it that I invested my redundancy payment in it." The RDS was the most structured so far with entrants having to pre-qualify. "We ran a scheme for registering entries," adds Lavin. "People who wanted to show their cars had to send us picture and a description.
"We got almost 800 entries and out of those we picked the top 100. Out of those 800 entries about 90 per cent of the owners would have spent between €1,000 and €5,000 modifying their cars, with some spending a litle more."
Lavin himself got into car modification well over a decade ago with his first car, a Vauxhall Chevette. He now owns a unique, one-off Mitsubishi GTO: "It's a Japanese import and the first thing I did was strip the paint down to the bare metal and respray it in an Alfa Romeo purlescent finish," he says. "This changes colour depending on the light conditions. As you walk past the car it changes from blue, to gold and then to silver and on a sunny day it comes up as a sky blue while on a cloudy day it looks a greenish gold.
"After that I put on special alloy wheels, a twin six-inch exhaust, and I upgraded the engine which is a V6 twin turbo developing 300 bhp."
He hasn't done anything to the interior yet, because time and money haven't allowed. But this will come. What drives him and others to do this? "It's a hobby," he says.
"I have no great interest in sports and this is what I am interested in. It just grows. But many people are interested in car modification without really knowing it. For example, when people go into a showroom to buy a new car they tend to specify extras such as alloy wheels, sunroof, air conditioning, a higher quality sound system and so on.
"These extras are all adding to the individuality of the car, and when other people see those extras they want them too. It's not a very big step from there to carrying out the modifications yourself or getting someone else to do them for you."
Like almost every hobby or interest, car modification enthusiasts fall into a number of distinct sub-groups. Generally, these categories are the in-car entertainment enthusiasts who will spend thousands or tens of thousands on audio and TV equipment for their cars; the styling enthusiasts who will deck out the body with new body kits, spoilers, paint and so on as well as investing heavily in high quality interiors.
Then there are the engine people who will have a car which looks like a Lada but can do 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds - giving that BMW driver at the lights a bit of a shock.
For the engine enthusiasts the latest craze is nitrous oxide - old fashioned laughing gas to you and me. This was featured in a recent film Fast and Furious, which has become a cult hit among the car modification fraternity. What it involves is the addition of a tank of pressurised nitrous oxide to the car.
This is connected directly to the fuel combustion system and has the effect of turning it into a form of rocket fuel.
The oxygen-rich gas makes the combustion process far more powerful, thus adding power to the engine. These systems are used to give short term boosts to the acceleration of the vehicle and transform them into veritable grand prix cars.
While the nitrous oxide modification may be a little extreme, Richard Lavin points out that the car modifiers have had a positive impact on car design and the value for money customers receive. "If you look back at the 1990 BMW 316, electric windows, stereo, tinted windows and so on would all have been optional extras. Today's buyer of a similar car is expecting these as standard.
"This is because people have specified their own modifications over the years and they become the norm rather than the exception. Similarly, we are now seeing Daewoo putting TVs, DVD players and PlayStations into some models - again this is following a trend established by car modifiers."
This happens even in the modification sector itself. "I have to admit that our first show in Tramore was of fairly poor quality," says Lavin. "But the guys who came there got ideas from each other and when they came back the following year the standard of entry was 10 times better and we are seeing that happen every year now."
Anyone wanting to see these extreme machines in all their glory can visit Xtreme Promotions' next show in the Kings Hall in Belfast on August 4th, where another hundred or so models along with some other special attractions such as American classics and gangster cars will be on show.