Image created by ChatGPT
My name’s Dominic. My friends call me Dom. I’ve had this machine in my head since high school. Lines, curves, the whole damn, sweet whine of her turbos. Christina. She’s a car. And yeah—she’s the best thing I’ve ever built. I don't have a dyno. Hell, I don’t even have a garage. Just a driveway, a borrowed jack, and a landlord that hates noise.
That same landlord loves driving past my tiny, two bedroom that's more fade than paint. Mounted in his 550 Maranello… Right as I'm getting home from eight hours of changing oil and checking tires.
Candy red. Carbon-fiber shell. Ferrari badge so clean it looked freshly minted by Enzo himself.
I can almost hear it mocking the bare steel Volkswagen frame sitting under the blue plastic tarp in my front yard —Stay under the sheet, poor thing. It’s cute you think you’ll ever run with me.—
“Dominic!” He rolls down the window as his heavenly chariot rolls by slowly. “You paying the rent this month or putting a hamster cage in that roller skate?”
I try to be respectfully defiant, but it comes out schoolyard, “Both, princess!” I shout back.
“Oh! So you admit it's a roller skate?” He cackles as the perfectly tinted glass goes back up and twelve cylinders of tuned-port combustion sing off down the street.
I was going to take it easy tonight… veg out in front of the TV after a shower and dinner. Not now. That VW has something to prove.
While the rest of the neighborhood settles into Netflix and air conditioning, I roll the jack under the front subframe and start wrenching. The sun dips low. Mosquitoes start showing up for blood. I don’t care.
I'm not building a car like this to show off. I'm building it because it’s the only thing that still listens to me when the rest of the world’s too loud.
—
Wow! Centro Stile…you're killing me here.
Located in Viale Enzo Ferrari, in the heart of the Ferrari factory, the building houses Maranello's design activities under a single, spectacular roof: over 100 designers and engineers, the Model shop, the Tailor Made area and the Ateliers.
The words flew straight off the Ferrari website and into my chest. A digital stake through my undead heart. My poor Bug is never even going to drip oil on that pavement.
I slam my fist on the desk. The laminated particle board surface curls and peels a bit at the edge. My mouse clicks frantically through link after link. Ads pop and close. Dealers, body shops, junkyards. All either too expensive or useless.
Fist slams twice.
The television in the corner is just barely above mute. I'm not listening to it.
“Meanwhile, a college student at Northwest University is suing for damages after discovering a professor using ChatGPT to make lecture notes…”
Wait. What?
I freeze. The cursor blinks in the middle of a half-loaded page for aftermarket superchargers.
“...claims the professor replaced original lectures with AI-generated content...”
I lean back, eyes narrowing. Not at the screen—at the air itself.
AI?
People were pissed off about lecture notes?
What else could it do?
—
Grok.com Ask anything:
<> How would a capable hobbyist go about turning an old VW into a custom supercar?
TAP-TAP, my fingers as words scroll into being. A 10-point bullet list with subtopics builds itself before my eyes. One or two things catch my eye.
Budget and Timeline: Expect costs of $20,000-$100,000+
Both numbers are too high. Looks like I'll have to get creative.
Test designs with CFD software or wind tunnel data if possible.
Seriously, Grok?
I run through the rest, weeding out the impossible, and bookmarking the maybe.
It creates images, too?
I don't have 100 designers camped out in my kitchen but let's see what it comes up with…
Whoa!
—
I'll skip the gory details. A year later and a lot of painful and expensive missteps, I'm lying on a mechanic’s creeper in a rented garage. The final torque done on the front motor mounts, I let my arms rest on the floor and savor the moment.
My knuckles are scraped. Sometimes my eyes feel like they are full of sand, a product of arc-welding flash burns. Every one of my T-shirts has a grease stain somewhere on it. My toolbox has multiples of every socket except the 12mm. They are all lost or broken.
But Christina is finally done.
I managed to stay under Grok’s original estimate, but not by much. I had to cut corners. She ain't nobody's supercar.
That was never the point. I'm trying to build something I can be proud of. I just want a seat at the table.
I don't have Pininfarina, I have ChatGPT and Meshy. The curvy, custom body panels that resulted were pricey but absolutely worth it. My engineering department isn't a four story campus, just a set of tabs on my web browser. The suspension geometry it worked out is grippy, silky magic. The hexagonal badge with a stylized “D” on the grill is a chromed 3D print from the local library.
I'm taking this baby home. Parking it right out front. Prancing pony princess can suck it.
—
750 Motor Club, Brands Hatch Saturday morning, Hot Hatch trials Sbarro Super Eight team tent
“This year's entry is a one-of-a-kind, hand built, meticulously crafted, marvel of engineering…”
The spokesmodel’s voice drones through the flowery speech prepared for her by some marketing intern. She says nothing that can't be felt by an appreciative examination of the Pirelli-shod sculpture behind her. It is deadly in its beauty.
Deadly to my dreams of competing in this race, that is.
A man in a fire resistant driver’s suit notices my attention and walks over. Sponsor badges compete for space on his chest and shoulders.
Makes sense, I don't know what I'm doing here. It takes real money to have a shot in these races.
“It's an impressive machine, isn't it?” he pops the rear hood, “a lot of really good people worked hard at getting the Ferrari 308 engine and chassis under this body. You know much about race cars?”
“I’m entered today, actually. Christina’s a Subaru-VW hybrid. Built her myself.” I offer a handshake. It's accepted unenthusiastically.
“You named it Christina? Cute. Who did your stress calculations? Those VWs aren't meant for that kind of power.”
“I ran it all through Grok and Deepseek. They got me close enough to fine-tune it by hand.” I try to sound like it's the perfectly normal way to build a car.
He's not impressed. “You're putting a bot in charge of your safety margins? If I were you, I'd forget about racing and focus on surviving.” He snorts, obnoxiously amused with his own joke. “This is a job for serious people who've studied this stuff for a long time, kid. You have to respect the craft.”
I watch him walk away, shaking his head.
Yep, about what I expected. Not gonna lie, he might be right.
—
Two heats…two middle of the pack finishes. Christina sings to me in the corners, but the fat lady isn't our friend today.
I jump out and trot over to the Sbarro team, clustered around their car, all smiles and back-slaps. Mr. Driver Man sees me coming and cuts me off.
“Good race, kid! I'm glad you threw your hat in the ring, after all.” The smile on his face doesn't quite match his words. I wait for him to twist the dagger. “You really helped us get our rearview mirrors dialed in!”
No words, I just turn and walk.
“Buddy, buddy, buddy!.” He catches up to me, hand on my shoulder. “Don't take it too hard. At least, you didn't embarrass yourself out there. You just can't expect a soulless app to do all the work for you.”
My finger spears his chest, unprotected by sponsor patches. “Show me the grease under your fingernails, “buddy”. The —app— didn’t do all the work.” My hand falls to my side, I take a step back. “You know what? I didn’t come here to win. I didn’t come here to put a nail in John Henry’s coffin. I’m just a guy with a couple of box wrenches and a day job. I'm no threat to you, or your precious ‘craft’. Just shake my hand, say ‘good race’, and we all go home happy.”
Mr. Driver shakes the offered hand, mutters a weak ‘good race’ and walks back to his team.
And I don't even have to care if he means it.
This guy with a day job and a street-legal race car doesn't have a trailer to take his girl home.
It's all good.
We hum along to the same tune on the drive back.
Maybe next time Princess drives by, the window stays up.