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SEMA’s Show Stoppers
Written by: Howard Walker
RACER Magazine   http://www.racer.com
11/01/2007
Las Vegas, Nev.
 

Of course, it's all the crazy stuff that grabs the headlines. The bling'd Mercedes SL600 covered with 300,000 Swarovski diamond-like crystals. The fake Rolls-Royce with 13 TV screens and, wait for it, 34-inch rims. Or the weenie 1958 Isetta bubble car that someone squeezed a blown 730-hp big-block Chevy in the back. How can you not love something that throws out four-foot flames?

But this year's trade-only Specialty Equipment Market Association – SEMA for short – tuner show that's just wrapping up after its four-day run in Vegas – is much more than an ode to the oddball, or temple of tackiness. There's some really cool stuff here.

So after four days of pounding through five massive halls each the size of Kansas, and packed with over 2,000 exhibitors, I bring you Walker's Top Six "coolest car" picks.
Team ETC’s outrageous ’Vette-engined Super Sky. » More Photos

But forget about kicking off with number six and counting down. Let's go for the grand-daddy of cool, the car that surely every serious car guy with high-test running in his blood would love to have in his garage – and that's John Haugh's Mustang-Lambo.

It's what happens when you have w-a-y too much money and a slightly warped
imagination; you go out and buy a brand new $200-grand Lamborghini Gallardo and a brand-new Mustang GT and let them fool around.

The result is a supremely stock-looking Mustang that just happens to have a 520-hp 5.0-liter Gallardo V10 in the back seat driving all four wheels with Lamborghini suspension, brakes and sequential-shifter transmission.

Cleveland-based Haugh, who calls his creation the Tractorri to reflect the fact that Ferruccio Lamborghini started off in business building tractors – I thought LamboStang would might have been cooler – says he built the car "to make people smile."

And the subtlety of the thing is remarkable; only the 19-inch Gallardo wheels at each corner, the Lamborghini brake calipers, and the view of the big V10 beneath the rear window, hint at the Mustang's Italian-stallion roots. Those, and the rasping, screaming V10 yowl that hits you when Haugh blips the throttle.

The car took him 10 months to build and after the show, he says he's going to use it as a daily driver. Well, maybe one of them. Haugh owns four other Lambos, a trio of new Ferraris – F430, 599, 612 – and a Maserati Quattroporte.
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