One of the many fun things about coming to LA for our periodic Autopian Leadership Synods is that I get to wander around Galpin Auto Sports and see what sorts of fun project cars they’re working on. I was in luck this time, as there’s something especially fun being cooked up: they’re putting one of those Liberty Walk Ferrari F40 body kits on a tiny Autozam AZ-1. But there’s something not quite right going on, and let’s see if you can spot what it is.
Are you familiar with the Autozam AZ-1? I suspect most of you are, but if not, it’s worth knowing about, because it’s one of the purest expressions of fun and not taking oneself too seriously, rendered in automotive form. Autozam is a sub-brand of Mazda, and the AZ-1 is essentially a Kei-class supercar.
It meets all the Kei-class restrictions: the tiny exterior dimensions, a 660cc engine making a maximum of 64 hp, that sort of thing. But unlike most Kei cars that have space-maximizing bodies designed for practicality, the Autozam AZ-1 is all about fun. Here, we have a video where I get to drive around an AZ-1:
See what I mean? They’re a great time.
One of the many fun things about an AZ-1 is how all of the body panels are relatively easy to remove; this means that, if, say, a company wanted to make a body kit for the AZ-1 that made it look like a Ferrari F40, one could absolutely do that. And, for reference, this is what a Ferrari F40 looks like:
Now, when you translate the design vocabulary of the Ferrari F40 to the proportions of an Autozam AZ-1, you end up with something that looks a lot like one of those fun Leen Customs pins caricature of the car:
(By the way, you can get exclusive Autopian Leen car-pins when you become a member, just saying.)
Now, like I said, over at GAS they’re putting one of these body kits on an Autozam AZ-1. And, in looking at it carefully, you can see one issue that has to be addressed, one I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen on a car. Let’s see if you can spot it:
Can you tell from that angle? It may be easier to see it from the side:
If you want the reveal, just click that image up there. See what’s happening?
Somehow, this car now has negative ground clearance. As in the body extends lower than the wheels, so were it not resting on those blocks, the body would be in contact with the ground and the wheels would be suspended, like a toddler’s dangling legs on a chair. That makes for a less-than-optimal driving experience.
Here, you can see it more dramatically in a close-up:
One of the technicians at GAS confirmed this wasn’t just a wheel size issue, but that they would need to install some sort of lift kit on the suspension to get this to work. They’re confident they can do it, of course, but it is a sort of hilarious problem to encounter, and not one I think I’ve seen before. I’ve definitely seen lowered cars with ground-scraping body kits, but never ones where the wheels are left essentially dangling.
They’ll get it sorted, and this will be an incredibly absurd and fun little car. Until then, just enjoy the madness of the process.
It needs really large rear wheels and an absolutely humongous penny so it can do wheelies.
The only thing this Autozamerrari is missing is a PA system with a voice synthesizer that sounds like your voice on helium. One could have a lot of fun driving around and messing with people using a PA system.
Negative ground clearance? Just like the current NASCAR racers. Ask any of the drivers.
So I guess they missed the deadline for Bad Bunny to drive this onto the field at the Super Bowl halftime show?
No wonder the Orange Turd was offended..,
The concept of a small caricature F40 is charming, but is there no way to get there without butchering an Autozam which is orders of magnitude more so ?
It’s all fun and games till the Ferrari lawyers show up…
Some of my friends were into Mini Trucks in the 90s. This stance was common for those.
Impressive no doubt, but the AZ-550 Type C would have been a thousand times cooler. Mazdas have no need for stolen valor, honestly.
I’d love to have the Type-C body, except change the engine cooling duct to a NACA duct, add rear wheel skirt and longtail, and remove the spoiler. This thing would make a sick streamliner. Then put a 1.9L TDI engine in it or convert it to an AWD electric. Instant high-performance supercar with triple the fuel efficiency of anything you can buy.
Anyone know how I can sign up with Leens Customs? Tapping ‘Join The Cult’ at the top doesn’t seem to do anything.
The Leen pin contains the answer: The F40 has huge wheels! Get rolling stock with the diameter/width/offset to fill out the oversized arches and you’ll be bang-on for ground clearance.
Yes, in addition to the point that they may be able to increase the diameter (hard for me to see with these pics), the wheels also are comically undersized in width compared to the wheel wells. It looks like someone’s trying to hide the rear wheels out of sight. It probably needs a size up in tire diameter, a lot in the width (or just more offset), and then see about suspension lifts. And maybe start worrying about wheel bearings and handling, with the increased track width but the hubs not moving.
I suspect if they run wider wheels, they can get away with changing the track width only half the distance: To keep the same inboard clearance and gain 3 inches on the outside, you’d widen the wheels by 3in and then change the offset by 1.5in, adding 6in to the overall width but only 3in to the track, which is measured at the centerline of the tires. I’d definitely look into a preemptive wheel bearing change and a reduced service interval, though, because increased diameter also increases loads at the bearings.
And increased offset puts the loading on the bearings 1.5” further out, probably moving it from nearly centered to overhung.
For sure, my point is at least it doesn’t move it 3″ out
I’ve never been to Japan, but do we only hear about the weirdest things they do or does the entire place have the ‘weird’ knob turned to 11 all the time?
I have been to Japan. We mostly hear about the weirdest things over here. There are plenty of things that seem weird from a US perspective, but plenty that seem normal, as well as a lot of things that are obvious improvements.
The most surprising, weird but reasonable thing I noticed was that literally everyone does rock/paper/scissors to decide things. All of the time. As in I saw two staffers do it, and the one that lost had to take out the garbage. I saw a couple do it in the street to determine where they were getting breakfast. I found this super charming.
Rock, Paper, and Scissors became popular in Japan soon after the Kamikaze pilots became a thing.
The more you know, and all that…
Alas, the game originates in China and spread to Japan (as a drinking game) in the 1600s as sansukumi-ken. It came to the west in the early 1900s, subsequent to Admiral Perry and all that.
https://minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/3017
How dare you try to clarify my version of history! /s
I went down that rabbithole right quick! But I do not recommend ever letting the truth stand in the way of a good anecote.
Grassroots drift events in Japan often have a rock, paper, scissors tournament among the drivers at some point during the day where the winner gets a prize. Sometimes it’s even something worthwhile like a set of tires or some other parts.
I was in Japan around Halloween about ten years ago. I don’t know if weird was running at 11 the whole time, but it was there a lot more than any other place I’ve been. Which, to be clear, was awesome (most of the time…), but it’s definitely a thing.
I have to go full hater on this project. Fake supercars suck, and the AZ-1 is such a cool car that doing this to one of them feels like a crime. I got to see one in person at an Autopian meetup, and I was part of a small crowd that walked right by a gorgeous Lamborghini to nerd out on the AZ-1. I meant no disrespect to the person who brought the Lambo and I do appreciate that they braved shitty Michigan roads to get there, but how many chances do you get to see an AZ-1 up close?
I don’t suspect they want to fool anyone with this kit. It’s a caricature, rather than an earnest copy. The proportions are hilarious, and it’s not like they had to chop up a unibody to make it happen.
It looks like a few too many Liberties were taken when translating this design from the OG F40 to the Autozam.
I do think this thing is cool though. In the pre- internet age of the F40, I remember seeing a toddlers ride on version in the Consumers Distributing catalog.
The shape and proportions were pleasing to me, so I tediously drew the image in pixilated form on my family’s Amiga computer.
This kit is like that toddlers car turned into a real car.
Deluxe Paint?
Oh hell yeah.
My brother still has a working Amiga 1200 and I’m pretty sure the file still exists somewhere.
I spent many days doing pixel art on that program as a kid.
I think I left my Amiga 500 in an apartment I moved out of twenty years ago. It took up too much desk real estate to keep as a curiosity. I met some strange Amiga people back in the BBS days.
Amiga people were always an eccentric bunch. It’s a common trait of secret geniuses.
The games on that machine were 15 years ahead of their time.
I first feasted my eyes on the F40 after getting Test Drive 2 for Christmas one year.
Some other favorites were Dragon’s Lair and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I remember my first World of Amiga show in ’86 or ’87. It was the first time I had ever seen a mouse.
All around the show were these plotter type printers that had a magazine of coloured pens which the machine would pick up and use to create really cool wire frame prints.
My dad took home a print of an all new RX7 Turbo, which he framed and hung prominently in our powder room.
I got Dragon’s Lair for xmas when it came out. I think it was on several floppies (8 if I remember right) and the last 6 of the floppies were blank.
Roger Rabbit was great, and there were a bunch of other games by the same company (Buenavista?) that were also great, especially the three stooges game. The Amiga versions were much better than the PC versions because they had actual audio samples.
I am still in love the the Lotus Esprit because of Test Drive.
Edit: Three Stooges was from Cinemaware, who also did Defender of the Crown.
The Three Stooges game was awesome!
My uncle was a mechanic at the local Lotus distributor, so that was a big car in my childhood. He would fix them for wealthy clients and usually daily drove them for weeks at a time.
My actual favorite Amiga game of all time has to be Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
On the subject of pixel art and whether the file exists or not, I recommend Ahoy’s video “Four Bit Burger”. I never even seen an Amiga, but I was fascinated by the history lesson, and by the pains the author went to recreate this piece of lost media.
And here’s the li for my fellow nerds (posting separately because I think this will go to moderation): https://youtu.be/i4EFkspO5p4?si=rhvfoada8yrcuBlE
Cool! I will check this out for sure. There were a lot of amazing pixel art images created on the Amiga at the time, but I never knew much about the origins of them.
The video made me want to learn more about Amigas after all this time. I probably watched it a dozen times, and it is insane to imagine that the original author was creating all that knowing the app was so early in development that it lacked a save function-the image was always meant to disappear, save for that one photograph.
I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I definitely will.
Memory was very miniscule (about 500kb) and there was no hard drive, so using an Amiga 500 hundred always started with loading the operating system from a floppy disk. The OS was similar to Windows, and definitely inspired what became the standard PC desktop layout.
Having driven an AZ-1 and jonesed to have one in my driveway ever since, this strikes me as being like putting a Fiero body on an F40.
To each their own, I guess.
If this kit works for any other purpose than to get the wheels off the ground, what’s missing is the Hayabusa swap.
Everything.
No need to put any kit on such a cool car.
How did a firm like Liberty Walk get that this wrong? Maybe the kit is for substantially upsized wheels?
Edit: from the looks of the kit on their website, it does look like bigger wheels are needed. And maybe trimming of the bottom of the kit.
Are they that big an operation? Is there that much demand for supercar fender flares?
They’re a very big company by Japanese aftermarket standards. They make kits for a ton of stuff.
I feel like a lot of those tuner companies seem huge until one employee steals $50 from the register and the entire operation disappears.
Any tuning company still operating in Japan has earned their business by now and is likely doing okay. Liberty Walk mostly just does body kits for higher-end stuff so their clientele is pretty well-heeled, but even the companies who actually tune things, like RE Amemiya, Top Secret, HKS, etc. are doing okay because there’s still such a demand for their parts and services. It’s a smaller market than it was in the 90’s, but the people who are able to own and seriously modify cars right now have got dough.
The rise of time attack in Japan and elsewhere has also helped give a boost to a lot of the bigger shops, and some of the smaller ones, too.
That’s what I suspected as well, kei-sized performance tires are getting harder to come by, and the F40 did have very big rolling stock for the era, so you’d want bigger wheels/tires to match the style, both in diameter and width. Hell, look at how much the current wheels are inset! Covering that gap with just spacers would be downright irresponsible.
That would break with the strong tradition of perfectly-engineered kit cars!
Whatever could you possibly mean? The way Bradley doors never quite close and don’t match the contour of the body is a feature, so that the commoners can see that you have gullwings even when they’re closed!
Big, deep, wide wheels are part of that whole Rocket Bunny/Liberty Walk/RWB look anyway, so it’d fit.
Yes.
Joking aside, that is a unique problem, for sure. I’ve not spent that much time with ground kits, but enough to know that this is pretty strange.
Looking at finished examples (and the size of the wheel wells), the kit is meant to use much bigger wheels/tires.
That poor Autozam 🙁 What did it do to deserve this?!
It looks like it would make a fun bumper car at an indoor race track.
I’m also looking at the scooped-out vents or ducts or whatever those are on the hood, which don’t seem to exist on the actual F40. Why would you do that–make the design even busier when it’s already kinda small to carry all of the F40 details?
It’s a copy of their F40 kit, which added a clamshell with those vents. https://image-cdn.hypb.st/https%3A%2F%2Fhypebeast.com%2Fimage%2F2023%2F01%2Fliberty-walk-ferrari-f40-widebody-kit-release-info-000.jpg?w=960&cbr=1&q=90&fit=max
The obvious solution would be to install an adjustable air suspension which allows the wheels to be raised right off the ground, making it the most effective parking brake in history.
Also makes it super easy to roll back the odometer on your fake Ferrari when you borrowed it from your dad and drove around all day without telling him instead of being in school.
Remember Micro Machines? Here is one writ large.
It’s the jumbo shrimp of cars.