A Brief History of Bad A** Car Tuners
In case you haven’t noticed, our studio loves cars. We love other people who love cars. But we especially love people who love cars so much that they rip them apart to make better cars. In other words, we love car tuners.
Car tuners aren’t always lovable, though. The history of tuning is full of morally ambiguous, larger than life geniuses that make Tony Stark look like a big dumb softie. But who doesn’t like rooting for an anti-hero, amiright? So here is our shoutout to the best of car tuning baddies, from the dawn of the 20th century to today.
Louis Chevrolet
Before Louis Chevrolet rolled into Detroit in the early 1900s, automobiles were nothing more than glorified horse carriages.
The Swiss mechanic’s rise and fall at GM was, like his cars, loud and fast. But his legacy lives on in car design, racing, and tuning. He designed roll cages for crying out loud. The man deserves some recognition…you know, beyond having a car brand named after him.
Prohibition Bootleggers
Say what you will about NASCAR;
it has deep roots in car tuning history. Car mods kept the bootleggers rich and the people drinking all through prohibition. Guys in Florida and Mississippi would tune their V8 Fords and go bombin’ through the bayou to test their speed, all for the sake of outrunning the coppers.
Even after alcohol became legal again in ‘33, bootleggers still made money selling tax-free moonshine, so of course they still needed to outpace the police. The 1932 Ford Model 18 became a favorite of bootleggers and mobsters alike, and pretty soon little packs of speedsters were racing around one big track just for the hell of it. And there they have remained till this day.
John DeLorean
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Though we all know the DMC DeLorean from Back to the Future, the story of John DeLorean doesn’t get much play. He was a bit of a controversial dude; basically he embodied all the worst parts of Mad Men. But he was also a genius with a need for speed, and is almost certainly responsible for the first Detroit street race.
Because he was such a pain to work with, GM exiled him to Pontiac, where he poured all his creative energy into designing the Pontiac GTO, a midsize car with a large engine. When the GTO was released in 1964, the car was an immediate success, and so the American muscle car arms race began.
Car mods and racing have always gone hand-in-hand, so it should come as no surprise that street racing a la Fast and Furious began with DeLorean and other engineers meeting on Woodward Ave in Detroit to race prototypes down the highway, testing their power and speed. It was clearly a hell of a good time, as described by this incredible article from the Car and Driver archive.
Colin Chapman
Add lightness
Across the pond in Europe, Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, was pushing boundaries in Formula One racing. He hired engineers Peter Wright and Tony Rudd to help reimagine F1 vehicles, but they were way ahead of him.
The two had experimented with F1 cars in wind tunnels years before, and with Chapman’s blessing they began again. They discovered that side skirts on an F1 car could create so much negative pressure that the wind tunnel belt was pulled upwards towards the bottom of the car. Lotus became legendary on the race track, and other cars quickly followed suit. Little did Chapman know, another BA designer would soon beat him at his own game.
Gordon Murray
The godfather of the hypercar
While Lotus was dinking around with side skirts, Murray was studying the Formula One rulebook, trying to determine how best to proceed with a batsh*t crazy idea. Murray, of course, was responsible for designing the McLaren F1, which remains the most expensive car in the world, give or take a few million. The F1 featured a gold-lined engine bay that supposedly made the car run better…um yeah, okay bud.
But the coolest thing he designed by far was the 1978 “fan car,” a formula car with a big fan fixed on the rear -- which technically broke no rules. The fan purportedly cooled the car’s engine, but its real job was to create negative pressure that would rival Lotus on those hairpin turns. It accomplished this feat so effectively that the mod was banned from F1 racing. Still a win in our book, Murray!
Ken Block
No list of car tuners would be complete without Ken Block, may he rest in peace.
How the CMO of DC Shoes came to reinvent himself as a rally car racer will hopefully become the topic of a Hollywood biopic someday; for now, we must content ourselves with watching and rewatching his Gymkhana videos in our spare time.
Not only was he a skilled and fearless rally driver, but a crazy creative genius when it came to car mods. The best example of this is, of course, the Hoonicorn, a 1965 Ford Mustang that he completely revamped and premiered in Gymkhana 7, which yes you do need to watch again right now. We speak for gearheads everywhere when we say we miss you, Ken.
Liberty Walk
Nowadays, mods are made not necessarily for the sake of speed, but like, just for the hell of it.
Or should we say, the joy of it? That’s why Wataru Katu, the (in)famous founder of Liberty Walk tunes cars: it makes him happy. Even if his mods make auto purists very, very angry For the record, Katu’s cars make us happy too.. For more on Liberty Walk, we recommend Donut Media’s most excellent take.
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