Foose Design - Building the '65 Impala "Impostor" Part 2/3 (Detroit Autorama Presentation Video)

The imposter actually started when Dawn came in and said he wanted to build a car for his wife Alma. We got married and had that car for the first few years of her marriage, so it was a car that had a lot of emotional attachment to us. We found a car and he said to me, you know, it's a little long, maybe we want to shorten it a little bit and I thought maybe we would want to shorten it a lot because that car is very long and I proposed the idea to him. them, what if we go buy a new Corvette, take it to the shop, take off the body and put your Impala on it?

Once we've stripped the chassis down to its essence, just the chassis and a bit of the engine frame we mounted it on. that frame cut it in half and we were able to simply slide it a

part

the 7 and 5/8 inches, replace what was missing and then drop the Impala body on it, shortening the Impala's wheelbase by 7 inches, removing another 7 inches from the back. lowers the top an inch and a quarter, it's actually shorter, 8 inches overall, the windshield has been moved back 2 inches, all very, very subtle modifications. We were interested in doing a custom, you know, 65 Chevy Impala Super Sport, the total cost of your combination.

This with a new Corvette was not something we knew had been done in any significant way. I didn't want to take any of the engine cable hoses, everything is left stock, so something goes wrong and you can go to a dealer. you can plug it into the computer and put a new

part

in it and you can continue. We call it the

impostor

because it's actually a Chevy Corvette in 1965 clothing, it's been heavily modified but it's still a 65 Impala, but at its core it's purely a Corvette. Another reason it works because the

impostor

is that Donna Nelma drove a 65 Impala on her honeymoon.

This is not that car, it is better than that car, but it is the imposter. We started

building

this car and as we went along, Don wanted to get more involved and maybe go. to Detroit for the puzzle show. He had documented on paper what we thought we were going to accomplish and she wanted to accomplish in the bill and we discussed it with Chip to the point where we had sort of a consensus on what I wanted. What you had to do was take the approach of what if in 1965 General Motors' Corvette studio decided to build a muscle car in addition to the sports car we all know, so that all of this car's styling cues were based on a '65 Corvette?

We've done the most work on any car here at Foose Design because there's a lot of work that goes into trying to make those beautiful parts to make the bottom of the car as nice as the top if I'm going to build a Riddler car. I'm going to approach the entire chassis as a piece of sculpture and work of art and that's where the Riddler has gone lately. It's incredible what has been done to these racing cars. What you see is exactly what you would have purchased at a General Motors dealership. It's all there he just had to dress up to become a Riddler contender the reality is that the car weighs 350 pounds and his idea was to put it on a diet and slim it down to 125 pounds, beauty, he is the idea behind this.

So a lot of subtle things happen when you take it from 300 pounds or 350 to 125 and a lot of it isn't as noticeable, but it feels good when you look at the car. Being a

design

er can also be a curse because you see things. You want to fix and you're picky and you're trying to make it absolutely perfect. The subtleties between what you see and what you don't see. I don't think everyone else sees it, but it's stuff that can drive me crazy and stuff. The pursuit of perfection takes a lot of time. We've been on this car for six years, but when we finished it, I looked at every square inch of this car and I can tell you exactly what.

I could draw every little detail, but it's that attention to all those details that is needed to build a Riddler card. It will speak to you very softly and will be revealed through careful analysis and you will strain to look and then. You'll appreciate it and I think the car really speaks that way. We spent a lot of time on the colors and originally we had the car when we had it in 67 68 69 it was the green car so we wanted to maybe go green and we worked on that for a while and decided maybe we should go with a combination of apricot and champagne and then we started to refine that color scheme to the point that, as you see here now, I choose colors not only for the owner but also the owner's wife, so I pay attention to the way they decorate their house, the clothes they wear and I want Don's wife, Elmo, to absolutely fall in love with this car, color,

design

, textures, interior, wheels, tires, every element that we are making for them.

My goal is to bring them together to share this experience as they bring it out and share with everyone what we have done for them as a designer while they work on this car. I don't know exactly what I want to do. When I first look at it, you learn as you build and you want to fix this and that and you want everything to be as perfect as possible. That's why it takes so long to build a car that you're proud to take the Detroit and compete for a prize like the Riddler when you combine two cars like anything else in life when you combine things what you get here we have a Corvette and your Chevy Impala that came together and you're always a little nervous about what's going to come out as a combination, you know, but Chip is a very, very good mixer at that kind of thing and he had a vision and he put it together and we're not disappointed when I started with Foose design.

My goal was to have a shop where I could hire craftsmen and give them the opportunity to build the best cars they can build and I can't do that without guys like Don Buff who open their wallet and pay us to build. This car doesn't need another hot rod we are doing something that is 100% unnecessary but the best thing about this is that it is 100% driven by passion it is from the heart Don wants this car, he wants to give it to his wife and me. I can't think enough about this opportunity because I can't afford to build a car like this and without our customers you know they come and we start to get to know each other and we go through a project like this we've gotten good. friends, in the end I can't thank you enough for allowing me and the team to make your dream come true.

It's an honor for me to be able to build a car like this to not only showcase the design capabilities of Foose design but also the craftsmanship, the old world craftsmanship, because we're

building

by hand, there are some parts that, you know, are built with a mill and computer control, but the essential thing about this car is that it is hand-built the way cars used to be built. When you spend so much time with a team building cars like this, you know I'm going to look at cars that we've built in the past and what they represent to me is a period of time where we all came together and did something really cool. for someone and that's what the impostor is this is a group of guys who are such talented women companies that they all come together to do the best they can for I don't know Maybach and I want to thank everyone at Foose design and everyone on that list of the team because without You they will only be images on paper.