Why iconic car brands keep completely failing at restomods
There are some great restomods, says Meaden, but there are also some horrors
There’s something both glorious and grotesque about the burgeoning restomod scene. Barely a week passes without fresh unsuspecting classics being reanimated and contemporised, with mixed results. The best are deeply impressive. Some are misguided. The worst are absolutely gopping. Yet the quest to create the next zeitgeist‑y million-dollar revamp continues unabated.
It’s not hard to understand why restomodding is a modern automotive gold rush. With OEMs hogtied by legislation – and media outlets such as evo concluding the best driver’s cars have already been made – the prospect of a classic or modern classic receiving the benefit of material, manufacturing and performance-boosting advances is intoxicating.
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The flipside is that in the frenzy to find the next great ‘slept-on’ (God, how I hate that term) restomod donor car, opportunists looking to make a fast buck are behaving like latter-day resurrectionists. Only instead of robbing graves for the purposes of medical dissection, they’re snatching noble old classics from the annals of automotive history and setting about them with all the care of Burke and Hare.
I won’t name and shame for fear of being burked in my sleep, but there are some great examples of how these transformations should be handled. Over the years, some of the most seductive and enjoyable cars I’ve driven have been restomods. The efforts of Eagle, Alfaholics, Singer and Analogue would all find spots in my fantasy garage. Having recently taken a close look at DRVN Group’s Boreham Motorworks Ford Escort Mk1 RS, I’m sure I’d be ordering one of those, too.
Each takes a different approach, but all share a similar reverence. Reining in the urge for wholesale reinvention is key, just as having the requisite level of design and engineering skill, knowledge, resource and – perhaps most important of all – restraint are all critical factors in delivering something that can exceed its origins without erasing them. It’s far from easy.
Singer received a lot of flak for the Louis Vuitton cars shown at Monterey. It’s no secret I’m a founding member of the Singer Fan Club, but I’ll admit these cars were not to my taste. Still, while I have no desire for an LV-monogrammed surfboard, I’m worldly enough to see the controversial collaboration as a demonstration of Singer’s star power, capability and execution, not as evidence of a sudden shift in the company’s carefully crafted aesthetic. Normal service will be resumed, I’m sure.
That LVMH – the world’s largest group of luxury brands – should decide to work with Singer rather than an OEM signals a watershed moment for a scene rooted in the efforts of small-scale passion-driven enthusiasts. The fact Singer began as just that and now, after 15 years, has major investment and a trans-Atlantic operation with 700+ staff is one of the great modern fairytales.
Consequently, Singer has achieved escape velocity and transcended the restomodding scene, but what the future holds for the wider sector is less certain. Of the more recent efforts I’ve seen, the Boreham Motorworks Escort is the most intriguing. Partly because the extensively modified road car is being built alongside a perfect toolroom copy of an original Alan Mann Racing Escort, but mostly because both cars are the products of a ten-year, multi-model licensing deal with Ford.
This wholesale endorsement not only means DRVN Group’s directors can sleep easy at night, but all the cars they build carry official Ford/Boreham chassis plates, so they don’t need to be built from tin-worm-infested Mk1 Escort donor cars. Hence Boreham’s use of the term ‘continuemod’ rather than restomod.
It seems to me this collaborative approach could offer a way forward, at least for top-tier projects. Perhaps it could be a two-stage process: OEM approval to ensure harmony and then, if possible, fresh-build cars with their own identity to legitimise the end-product and remove restomodding’s unfortunate need to cannibalise original classics.
Pretty much every OEM that tries to do a restomod-style car seems to really struggle with the process of reimagining their most iconic models. Taking Porsche as an example, only because they’ve just shown a Flachbau version of the 991.2 GT2 RS, it strikes me that in-house design teams are too close to the subject and too conditioned to think inside the box. The best restomodders have a knack of capturing the essence of a classic without it being too literal in its translation. This new factory one-off looks awkward to me. As did the unique 993 Speedster also handled by Porsche’s Sonderwunsch team. Which is ironic given the revered Special Wishes department could legitimately claim to be the original Porsche restomodder. Go figure.
This story was first featured in evo issue 350.
