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00:29It inspires some really daring manoeuvres and craps, but it's just fun.
00:34Everyone who gets out of it has a huge smile on their face.
00:37The Lucra was the brainchild of Luke Richards,
00:40and he set up his California-based boutique car company to manufacture it.
00:45I first came up with the idea for the Lucra car in 2005.
00:49We got our first prototype in 2006.
00:52The job of the car is to be a lightweight, high-performance, high-powered car.
00:58The aim of his design was to combine the speed and power of an American muscle car
01:03with the manoeuvrability of a European sports car.
01:07My father told me you could either have a car that was fast in the straightaways
01:12or a car that was fast in the corners.
01:14Back then, the Camaros and the Mustangs were big horsepower
01:18and the Lotuses and the European sports cars were lower horsepower Porsche, but lighter.
01:23Growing up in England and growing up in America, I kind of felt like
01:26I kind of had a passion for V8s, but I also had a passion for lightweight sports cars.
01:30So I did what he said was impossible, and we made both in one.
01:34The lightweight body is made from carbon fiber,
01:37but it's not just about how little weight there is, it's also about where it is.
01:41We kept the car down around 2,000 pounds, even with a V8,
01:45and we made the car pretty stout.
01:47We didn't skimp out on any of the safety or rigidity, because that's equally important.
01:51We also made the car tail heavy, so the weight distribution is about 55 to the rear,
01:57but this gives it a nice mid-engine car feel.
02:00It has a little bit of oversteer, it likes to drive through corners,
02:03it's really easy to drive, really friendly, really difficult to spin.
02:07I mean, really difficult to get out of control.
02:10And we've tried completely, and it makes for a very high-performance car
02:15that's really easy to drive by a novice or a professional.
02:19Each Luca is built to order, and from start to finish,
02:22the build process takes around eight weeks.
02:25We start off with a computer model of the chassis.
02:28All the tubing is laser cut, all the sheet metal is laser cut.
02:32By the chassis it gets made, it goes to powder coat,
02:34the body gets made at about the same time.
02:36The body's all in one piece, so it's very, very strong all by itself.
02:39After we're done with the assembly, it goes out for alignment.
02:43We like to custom and do all the testing, because we feel like this way they feel more attached to the car.
02:48We take them and the car to a track, and we just carefully warm it up,
02:52carefully lap it slowly, and keep checking it,
02:55and lap it faster and faster and faster with a race driver to help,
02:59to train the customer how to drive it properly.
03:01And by the end of the day, the car is fully seated and broken in,
03:05the driver is fully trained, and after that we put the car in paint, and then interior.
03:09At that point, the car is back here, we have one final check over again,
03:13make sure everything is how we want it, we reassemble it,
03:16and we ship it to the customer.
03:18But aside from its incredible performance,
03:21the most rewarding part about designing the car is the reaction it gets from others.
03:26It's done a lot of things that I wouldn't do in a regular car.
03:29It's won races, it's jumped bridges in Mexico, it's been in movies, it's been off-road.
03:36The main thing what it does, that most every other car I've been around doesn't do,
03:40is it stops traffic everywhere it goes.
03:43Everyone wants to talk about it.
03:44If you go to the gas station, it'll take an hour.
03:47Everywhere you get near it, everyone wants to talk about the car.
03:50Everywhere you go, it makes people smile.
03:52Nobody's intimidated by it, nobody's threatened by it.
03:55They're just happy to see it, and they want to talk about it.
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