Yahoo Autos Recreating an F1 Icon From Scratch Is No Easy Task
Brandon Hegedus wanted to build an automobile.
He was no engineer, just a car nerd with no formal training other than his trade as a cabinet-maker. He was 32 years old and had a wife. He had a small house outside Calgary, Alberta, with a normal-size two-car garage that was already half full with a rat rod he had built out of a 1927 Ford. Not a lot of money to spend. Busy full-time job. Kids in diapers. But he wanted to do something different.
He had already built numerous vehicles, starting in his early twenties with a humble 1989 Dodge Caravan, which he turbocharged and modified, making it the most ridiculous minivan in his neighborhood. From there he built a high-performance Dodge Omni, which he raced at his local drag strip, Race City Motorsport Park, until it closed in 2011. He built the 1927 Ford rat rod with a Cummins 5.9-liter turbodiesel inline-six tuned to pump over 855 hp to the rear wheels. Now he was in his thirties, and this time around, he wanted to try his hand at a more ambitious project.
This story originally appeared in Volume 7 of Road & Track.
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“I had always loved the old Fifties and Sixties open-wheel cars,” Hegedus says. “I wasn’t really into old European racing, but I liked the style of the cars. So I started looking on the Internet and digging through books, searching for a car with cool factor and a history that would make it interesting.”
It had to be something Hegedus could actually build. For example, he wanted a car with a hidden engine—he loved the look of the 1967 Jim Clark Lotus 49, but could he really build a car with an exposed powerplant and air intakes that looked like an entire orchestral trumpet section climbing out of the rear end? The vehicle also had to have body lines that Hegedus could fabricate himself. It had to be clean, smooth, and gorgeous.
One night online he found pictures of a Sharknose 156, a Ferrari Formula 1 car that competed in 1961 and 1962. It had a covered engine (check) and smooth body panels that were handmade by Italian artisans (check), theoretically possible for him to replicate.
“As I read more history of the car,” Hegedus remembers, “the more interesting it got.”
The Sharknose was the very first Ferrari F1 car with the engine behind the driver. It was what Phil Hill drove to win the F1 World Championship in 1961, the only time an American-born pilot took the world’s greatest racing title. As legend has it, in the Sixties, Enzo Ferrari personally ordered existing Sharknose 156s to be destroyed, to keep the car’s technology a secret. That, for Hegedus, was what flipped on the ignition switch in his brain. In the fall of 2016, he decided to build a Sharknose by himself, in his tiny garage. He would have to find the money, the time, the know-how. He would have to beg his wife to put up with him. He was determined to build an accurate and road-worthy example of this historic racing machine, with no real blueprints to show him the way.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hegedus is not alone.
There’s a whole subculture out there of passionate people building vehicles in their garages, and not just kit cars. You’ve heard of homebrewed beer. These are homebrewed cars. In most cases builders use a mix of common components and hand-built one-off items to create a totally unique vehicle.
Take Joe Harmon, for example, from Mooresville, North Carolina. While studying industrial design in grad school, Harmon decided to build something for his final project that had no precedent: “the world’s only wooden supercar,” as he put it. He built the Harmon Splinter over some 20,000 hours. The all-wood body was made of strips woven like carbon fiber on giant looms. He even handcrafted the wheels, which have floating spokes of walnut and ash, and packed a modified Chevy LS7 V-8 behind the cockpit. While the car is not street-legal, it drives and is gorgeous. He even designed a unique Harmon Splinter logo.
How about Peter Giacobbi, a Ferrari fan in California who homebrewed a 1959 Testa Rossa? While visiting family in Italy, Giacobbi found a body a coachbuilder created for Ferrari in the late Fifties; the automaker decided not to use this particular coachbuilder, so the body had been hanging on a wall for decades. Giacobbi bought it and used it to build his own 250 Testa Rossa tribute. Giacobbi’s car got a bunch of publicity a few years ago, including an appearance on Jay Leno’s Garage. “It was the most desirable car to me,” he told Leno. “I can’t afford an original. The originals are worth between $40 and $50 million.” So Giacobbi homebrewed his own.
There’s the VCCA-Speedsters, a subgroup of the Vintage Chevrolet Club of America consisting of nearly 50 car nuts who build and race prewar speedsters based on vintage Chevy mechanicals from the Twenties and earlier. One of them, Dave Penniman, now a retired information scientist living in Ohio, spent over 50 years hand-building his speedster, based on a 1928 Chevy chassis, and recently sold it to a private collector.
Other examples abound. There are numerous Facebook pages for homebrew car builders, full of pictures of projects in progress. Nearly all of them are based on existing vehicles or borrow heavily from production cars. Not so with Brandon Hegedus. He was going to build his Sharknose entirely from scratch.
The day after Hegedus decided he would build a Sharknose, he went to look at a 2003 Suzuki Hayabusa that was for sale. He brought his brother-in-law, who took the bike for a spin around the block. That confused the owner.
“Do you ride?” he asked Hegedus.
“Nope. Never have.”
The owner said, “Uh, this is quite the motorcycle to use as a starter bike.”
“Of course I didn’t tell him what I was going to do with it,” Hegedus remembers.
He bought the Hayabusa for $4300, took it home, and tore it apart, retaining the 175-hp inline-four, driveline, brakes, and gauges. Everything else, down to the bike’s frame, he sold. He couldn’t afford an actual Ferrari engine; the Hayabusa motor would provide the power. Then he set to work building his chassis. He ordered a bunch of tubing to form his frame. “I started looking at pictures of the car and using scale rulers,” he said. “I had to guess. . . . This is how long the frame should be, this is how wide, this is how tall. Then, I started bending tube.” Hegedus didn’t know how to TIG weld, so he taught himself. “The welds on the chassis get better as you go toward the back and the bottom of the car,” he says.
“It just came together slowly and organically,” he explains. He was building this tribute Ferrari $50 to $100 at a time, documenting it all on his Instagram account. He took apart the Hayabusa gauges and fit them in his dashboard. He ordered other components online from Great Britain—new wire wheels meant for restoring Triumphs and Austin-Healeys, period-correct Dunlop tires (“Those were surprisingly expensive,” he says). Using computer-aided design, he drafted his own suspension and then built it.
Bodywork would be the greatest challenge. He opted to form it by hand from carbon fiber and dreamed up his own fabrication process. “I started in on the body,” he says, “having no idea if my process would work.”
Hegedus began with a huge chunk of Styrofoam (another thing that was surprisingly expensive). He carved out the cigar shape of the original Sharknose, creating a buck. He waxed it and sprayed it with mold release, then made molds of fiberglass on top of the Styrofoam, using playing cards to create flanges so he could remove the molds in pieces. When ready, he took the fiberglass molds off the Styrofoam and brought them to a car wash to get rid of the mold-release residue.
“The guy at the car wash was very confused,” Hegedus remembers. “I told him I was making a canoe.”
When he put the molds back together, he had the same shape as the Styrofoam buck, rendered in hollow fiberglass. Next he laid carbon fiber in those fiberglass molds. When he popped out the carbon forms, he had the shape of the body. At this point, it weighed exactly 50 pounds, three ounces.
Using reference photos, he cut the carbon-fiber body into individual panels, like those used to build the original Sharknose. This brought him to the most complex bodywork challenge: forming the flanges for overlapping panels, the windshield, and numerous air scoops on the body. Two large panels form the back of the car, each with a long scoop. The entire car required something like 20 molds.
When Hegedus started cooking weird plastic pieces in his oven, his wife got nervous. The original Sharknose had two plexiglass bubbles over the engine bay. To make them, he got himself some plexiglass, built a pressure box and a jig for the shape, and heated it all in the oven. When the plexiglass was warm, he used compressed air to shape it through the jig.
“The final step was to put the body onto the chassis,” he says, “and this was terrifying. Until you do it, you can’t be absolutely sure it will fit. Will the cockpit of the body be exactly where it’s supposed to go on the chassis? The wheels? I made it by hand according to my measurements, just like they did in 1961. There’s an element of guesswork.”
When he married the body to the chassis, everything fit snug. It was nearly ready to rev.
Hegedus found a local guy in Calgary who collected emblems and, miraculously, had what he believes to be a period-correct Ferrari badge. So the prancing horse on the front of Hegedus’s car is authentic (the others are stickers).
Which raises a question. Ferrari is notoriously protective of its brand and intellectual property. Hegedus is upfront about the fact that his Sharknose is a tribute car—he’s not claiming it to be anything else, and he’s not trying to sell it. He built it to be a show car, something he hopes will excite people. For now, he has received no cease-and-desist letter from lawyers in Maranello.
In 2018, before the car was fully done (he finished it earlier this year), he was ready for a test drive. He got a temporary permit and invited some friends.“I started out in an alley, and I stalled it a bunch of times,” he says. “It was embarrassing.” But then he got the hang of it, motoring out onto the road.
“It was tight,” he says. “Crisp. It drove like butter. It felt like a race car. I could feel the pavement. But it was smooth enough that I could drive this thing for three straight hours comfortably.” The gauges worked, the steering turned the car, and that Hayabusa engine gave off a thrilling exhaust note, even if it wasn’t an actual Ferrari motor.
Hegedus won’t win any world championships in this Sharknose, the way Phil Hill did back in 1961. Still, his car is a triumph all its own.
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