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Extreme Tuning These days when a Hollywood celebrity or a famous singers buys him- or herself a new car, they go to the local Mercedes or Bentley dealer and buy themselves a 150.000 dollar car. But that’s not all. For a celebrity a new car is like a new house, without furniture and wallpaper: It needs to decorated!! So the car will be brought to a specialized company which equip the car with new 20” chrome wheels, new bumpers, an expensive stereo and an even more expensive DVD system which has LCD-displays in the headrests. The celebrity goes home with his new 300.000 dollar home-cinema-set-on-wheels, thinking he has bought something very rare and exclusive, just to find out at home that Busta Rhymes has bought himself an even more expensive Mercedes, with an even bigger wheels, more expensive stereo and a Playstation II for the passengers…....ahhhh nuts!!! In the 1980’s that wasn’t so much different, except for the fact things were a bit more low-tech (for today’s standards of course) and the “decorating” of cars went from very subtle to very, very extreme. As most of you might know, the tuning-business boomed in the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s. Suddenly there were tuning companies in every village, especially in the tuning- homeland, Germany. There were companies which were specialized in new bumpers, new wheels, spoilers, wider wheelarches and of course an SEC-style bonnet for every Mercedes-type. On top of that were the second type of tuning-companies. They could give you a new leather interior, new suspension, engine-tuning and new brakes to handle the speed. The whole tuning-cake is topped off with a cherry named Extreme tuning. Extreme-tuning companies could offer you anything you like. You want your Mercedes in same color as your dogs eyes? Then that’s what you’ll get! You want 24-carat gold rims? Just pay and that’s what you’ll get! You want to have an off-road-stretch-pickup-truck-SEC? No problem! If you have the money……. These companies were nothing less than dream-factories. Loads of very wealthy sheiks made very many trips to Europe to see their dreams come true. In those early 80’s there must have been quite a need for such cars, and there were probably a lot of customers who were willing to buy more than just one car, because by 1984 there were some twenty companies, most of them offering more or less the same. It was obvious that when one company had an original concept, and showed it to the public at the Geneva Motorshow, the next year, five more companies had the same “original concept” in their program. A very good example of this is the 500 SEC with Gullwingdoors. Although this was a very unique idea, there were half a dozen companies who did this conversion, and it must have started somewhere…/Bram |
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