The slightly unusual car you see here is the answer to a debate that was had between Pawel Wisniewski and his friend Jans Slapins, they had both been watching a drag race between a Lamborghini and a Rat Rod and found that they loved and hated different elements to both designs.
As both men are designers they set about a new project to take their favourite elements from both cars and combine them into one extreme interpretation. Pawel is a sketch specialist and Jans is a 3D modeller so Pawel set to work creating the outline of the vehicle, the two men collaborated on every element and took design inspiration from Formula 1 cars, the Plymouth Cuda, the Vought F4U Corsair and even a 1960s era refrigerator.
They wanted the finished model to use the most advanced engineering possible, so they chose pushrod actuated suspension and an unusual hydraulic drive system that reduced weight and allowed the car to fit 4 adult passengers. In true rat rod spirit, a twin-turbo Small Block V8 was selected as the engine – this was connected to a sequential 6-speed transmission. Carbon fibre has been used extensively around the central chassis-cell and a low-mounted engine has been pushed as far back as the design allowed to offer as close to 50/50 weight distribution as possible.
Interestingly, the wheels have built-in brake rotors – a design feature you don’t see everyday that actually looks fantastic. Although there are no current plans to put the Lamborghini Rat Rod into production, there really should be. Hopefully one day we’ll have room-sized 3D printers capable of creating functional vehicles like this one, in the meantime we’ll need to brush up on our Maya skills.
The finished vehicle looks like exactly the sort of thing that the team at Lamborghini would design if they were tasked with creating a Batmobile for a 1930s period remake. Which actually isn’t a terrible idea.
Click here to visit Jans’ website and here to visit Pawel’s.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
