Built-from-scratch supercar snags honour for hobbyist
Some people have hobbies like collecting stamps, building model ships, making quilts or constructing train sets.
But 44-year-old Ryan “Lightning ” Mcqueen of Sherwood Park has spent 14 years building a twin afterburner jet-powered supercar.
The supercar is built from scratch with two 18,000 horsepower Rolls-royce viper engines capable of going 640 km/h.
Mcqueen used Google and Youtube over the years to learn how to build the vehicle.
He didn’t know a lot about cars so he had to use creative resources to learn. He didn’t know how to weld so he had to teach himself.
“If I had a problem I just researched it,” said Mcqueen.
His first project was building a tube bender to construct the steel tubing for the car in a cost-efficient manner.
To create a mould for the body of the car, he took the body of a radio-controlled Ferrari Enzo, carefully sliced it from front to back in 26 pieces, put that on overhead projector paper to scale it up 10 times.
He then cut the pieces out of plywood and filled them with Styrofoam before doing the bodywork over top.
“So that’s why that part took five years,” Mcqueen said laughing.
The car cost $90,000 to build, which Mcqueen says isn’t that much when you consider how much it would cost to have someone build it for you.
“I couldn’t afford that,” said Mcqueen.
Recently he was on Metal Supermarkets Facebook page and saw that they were holding a contest called Metal My Way for custom metal works. Mcqueen said he entered his car just to see what would happen.
When the other 700 submissions were published to the website he figured that he wasn’t going to win because of the great work other work people submitted.
“Then a week later I got an email saying I won. I won a plasma cutter, which is great because I don’t have one,” said Mcqueen.
There’s still some road testing required before taking the car onto a raceway.
It’s something the family has all been a part of.
“My daughter is four and my son is seven and they have their own coveralls out here in the garage,” Mcqueen said.
When asked what his wife thinks about all of this, Mcqueen said, “Well she named the car.”
The car’s name is “Insanity.”