We get to see a lot of cars here at our Oxfordshire HQ.
Great ones, rare ones, fast ones, expensive ones, interesting ones, weird ones, old ones, big ones, small ones….you get the picture.
But we’ve never encountered anything quite like this one.
This creation started out in life in 1966 as a Chevy C-10 pick-up.
Then it was worked on by Jim Hall, of Iron Customs in Indiana. He chopped the body and then sold the car as an incomplete project to its next owner, an LA hot-rod builder by the name of Brian Davis, who got the build to about 80% completion.
He then handed over the final 20% of the build and customisation to Bodie Stroud, of BS Industries, who is a bona fide rockstar among custom car builders. His work has featured on Jay Leno’s Garage and he’s built cars for stars including Johnny Depp. BS Industries tackled the steering, brakes, fuel system and, well, lots of other stuff.
Once finished, the car was known and liveried as ‘Nosferatu’.
Shortly afterwards, early in 2016, the car came to the attention of the British co-originator of the legendary Carmageddon gaming brand, who is also the CEO and co-founder of the company behind it - Stainless Games Ltd.
He is Patrick Buckland, creator of Carmageddon, and he saw an opportunity to use the car as a promotional tool for the 2016 launch of Carmageddon: Max Damage.
And that’s why this fire-breathing sinister-looking automotive behemoth is wrapped in the livery you see before you today. You can see two renderings of the in-game model that their artists created for the game, it's quite impressive.
Amazingly, the car was road legal in the US (which might give you some hope that similar status could be possible here – with a few modifications, of course), and there are photos of Patrick's wife driving it in rush-hour Los Angeles traffic, an accomplishment for which there really cannot be too much praise.
The car featured at a number of video game trade shows in the US before being shipped back to the UK, where it turned out at a few promotional events and, at one point, made an appearance at Goodwood, where it attracted nearly as many curious onlookers as an Aston Martin Valkyrie parked nearby.
It’s undoubted ability to command attention is partly a consequence of its striking appearance, but mostly down to the sound it makes when you fire-up the mahoosive 454 Chevy big-block engine.
That’s 7.4-litres of good ol’ grunt under your right foot and ample proof of the old adage that there’s simply no replacement for displacement.
The sound you hear first is the fuel pump, which sounds more powerful than a small saloon car on its own.
Then you hear the red air intake flaps banging open and shut like privy doors at a curried shellfish festival.
Next, and please make sure you’re standing well back from the eight mortar-like upturned exhausts when this happens, an apocalyptic cacophony of explosions, roars, shrieks, wails, pops and barks erupts like an electrical storm over the Eiger or a too-close-for-comfort supernova.
And when we say the exhausts are mortar-like, Patrick tells us that a carefully placed sausage was launched from one at Goodwood and may now be orbiting Jupiter.
{Health & Safety note: please make sure that the exhausts are covered when the car is not in use – a stone or coin dropped through the manifold would not be good news for the engine.}
It was then in storage for many years, before Patrick bought it from his own company in 2021 with a view to getting it road legal in the UK.
That plan never quite materialised and he is only selling now because this thing takes up an awful lot of garage space and really deserves to be used more often.
