An Oamaru man’s scratch-built car may give it a run for its money.
Over the past four years, Josh Lee has designed and built his own car at his home workshop in Weston.
The engineer’s "pipe dream" began during the Covid lockdown in 2020 and he has devoted on average 10 hours a week on his pet project ever since.
Now, Mr Lee’s dream car is almost ready to hit the road.
Sporting a turbocharged 2-litre Honda engine, with a manual six-speed transmission, it is designed to be a "driver’s car", Mr Lee said.
"It’s an open-top speedster style, they call it.
"It’s set up kinda like a race car but with a few more luxuries for being nice on the road. It’s not primarily for any type of racing. It’s really to have some fun in."
Mr Lee’s engineering knowledge and skill means the unique car is nearly ready for the open road — albeit for one small hitch "on the paperwork".
Until that happens the driveway is as far as the car will go until it is officially deemed road-ready.
"It’s pretty much finished."
The 32-year-old works for Apex Engineering as a designer and a computer-aided design operator.
It means he is well versed in converting complex technical instructions and diagrams into reality.
"That’s definitely a big help in the whole project," he said.
"In fact, I went a bit over and above, it turns out. When it comes to that pre-design stage, I had virtually crash-tested the car."
The car’s technical innovation came as a surprise to those charged with officially certifying it as road ready.
"I worked out load ratings on things and stuff ... they were like, ‘we normally get these as pencil drawings’.
"Mine had animations and things. They said, ‘this is great but you didn’t need to do any of this’."
However, Mr Lee said this was part of his approach, to test and troubleshoot during the build to rule out any big issues.
"The later you run into problems, the harder they are to fix."
Despite having the skills to assemble the car’s frame, elements of the build did take elbow grease and some extra support.
"The biggest thing of the whole car was building the body. That took a lot of time and a lot of hard work sanding."
And some specialist skills, like electrics, came via a friend.
"I had to learn how to wire a whole car, so that was quite a challenge."
Mr Lee said he initially decided on a rear-engined car.
From there he planned the steering and with computer modelling drew the frame to bring the two components together.
He documented his work on his own Youtube channel.
The inspiration came from his former work colleague and mentor, Wayne Ross, from his days as an engineering apprentice at Alliance Pukeuri.
Mr Ross at the time was building a "ground-up" hot rod and introduced his young apprentice to a "rule book" on how to build a car for the road.
Mr Lee thought the book concept was "pretty cool" and slated it down for his "bucket list".
"From there, I then started really reading into the rules, to work out how I was going to be able to do it."
Ultimately, the early loss of his former mentor Mr Ross inspired Mr Lee to get on with it.
"A year after he retired he actually passed away, so he never finished his car.
"I was just like, ‘that’s the straw for me, I’m just gonna start now and work out the money later’.
"It was his life passion to get that finished. That’s why I decided to not wait ... I’ll just start now."
