Two Ways To Build A Carbon-Bodied Car

It was hard to miss the the colorful Audi Quattro S1 recreation built by LCE Performance in collaboration with visual artist Rocketbyz.

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It’s probably easy to determine which party did which parts of the work, but the short of it is that LCE Performance mated the underpinnings of two cars together to build a “true” Quattro before laying their amazing carbon fiber bodywork over that.

Of course, this one also has some extra aero bits as it was built as a tribute to Walter Rohrl’s Pikes Peak Hill Climb car from 1987.

LCE Performance utilized and tuned a 2.5-liter 20-valve inline five with a large KKK turbocharger to produce near 1,000 horsepower, which is delivered to BBS Motorsport wheels through a 6-speed sequential gearbox. Inside, carbon-shelled Recaro buckets keep you in place, and the colorful Rocketbyz theme is continued on these.

The Audi weighs in at 1,100kg (~2,425lb), and custom-spec KW coilovers keep it planted. It’s a wild rendition of an already wild concept by LCE, which was, well… based on a car that was pretty wild to begin with. Thanks for that, Audi.

Oh, and the car is for sale if you think it’d look nice in your garage.

Carbon Skyline

Outside of Central Hall, there was another carbon-bodied car that was impossible to ignore.

This monster of an R32 was built by Kazushige Sakamoto of Garage Active in — of course — Japan. This isn’t the first time a full-carbon GT-R from Garage Active has blessed our undeserving eyes here at Speedhunters, and you might remember Mark’s feature on their red carbon-weaved Skyline last year.

Like that car, I love how the consistency of the directional weave is maintained through the separate body panels. This example seems to take things several steps further though, with carbon fiber utilized just about everywhere.

Bodywork: carbon fiber of course. Door jams: carbon fiber. Floors: carbon fiber. Rear seat delete: carbon fiber. Rear shelf: carbon fiber. Recaro Pro Racer RMS seats: you guessed it – carbon fiber. And yet the factory dashboard remains and has been trimmed in black leather with white stitching, as had the console. Plus, the car retains an air-conditioning system, which has been converted to R134a for many more years’ worth of cool driving.

My only complaint was that the car showed 23 kilometers on the odometer instead of 32. A real missed opportunity…

And then you open the hood, where you are greeted by a huge HKS/Garrett turbocharger that feeds an RB26 fitted with the works from HKS to now displace 2.8 liters.

I wasn’t the only one completely floored by this car. As you’ll see, I caught this particular guy moments after he picked his jaw up off the floor and reinserted his eyeballs into their sockets. Hopefully they stay in place now, or he may need to visit a hospital.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty here, as such a vehicle deserves much more than a few shots at the Toyo Treadpass. But I love how Sakamoto-san and Garage Active have created the ultimate street-spec GT-R with a perfect blend of performance and style.

Oh, and carbon fiber. Did I mention that?

Trevor Ryan
Instagram: trevornotryantyrphoto.com

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