00:00 The car was built over a course of six years, it took 22,000 man hours to build it.
00:06 Just a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
00:08 This fully customized Buick Riviera has been a labor of love for Canadian J.F. Nornier.
00:16 He's been renovating vehicles since the age of 13, but in 2014 this Buick finally earned him the coveted Riddler Award
00:24 for America's most creative and innovative custom car at the Detroit Autorama.
00:30 The project began with a 1964 Riviera, bought from a junkyard for just $400.
00:38 People always ask me why a '64 Riviera, well the long and the short of it is, when I was 21 years old I had a '64 Riviera,
00:45 I sold it to start my first business and I thought to myself, I'm going to have another one of those cars one day.
00:51 I didn't really know I was going to take it this far.
00:54 What followed were countless modifications to the original Buick body.
00:58 A 1971 Riviera roof with its unique shape and sloped rear window was fitted to the 1964 chassis.
01:09 The car was shortened by removing sheet metal from behind the doors and rear wheel openings.
01:14 The front wheel openings were moved forward to make space for a 6.2 litre Chevrolet V8 engine,
01:20 which provides 784 horsepower.
01:23 JF estimates that he spent $300,000 on the project in total.
01:29 The car was built over a course of six years, it took 22,000 man hours to build it.
01:35 It was everything I could afford, it was my parents' house got remortgaged, my house got remortgaged.
01:40 The math's pretty simple, it's 22,000 hours, 75 bucks an hour shop rate, you're looking at a million and a half just in hours.
01:49 JF named the finished car Revision and in 2014 he proved that one man's trash is another man's treasure by winning the Riddler Award.
01:58 But despite his success, JF warns that budding car customisers shouldn't take such projects lightly.
02:05 It was ups and downs, it was always a battle to try to get enough money to buy parts,
02:10 to find enough time in the week to balance family, business and a project of this magnitude.
02:17 I always felt like giving up, there wasn't a day where I didn't feel like it was too much, we'd taken on too much and we'd just gone too far with it.
02:24 Be very prepared, don't just build your first car and think it's going to win, this is our fourth attempt at it.
02:31 You've got to be prepared, you've got to be prepared to give up everything for a long, long time.
02:35 There's no doubt though that he's proud of turning a rust bucket into his most prized possession.
02:42 There are people that love it, there are people that hate it, there's kind of nobody in the middle.
02:47 This car is what I wanted in a race car, this car is what I wanted in a show car and it's beyond that on all aspects.
02:54 I have drag raced the car, I have road raced the car, I have won the biggest award in the world,
02:59 those three have never been put together and I drive my kids to school in it and take the kids for ice cream.
03:04 [Music]
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