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Written by Rowan Horncastle
While we"ve been preparing a wide-arched and slammed Colin the Caterpillar cake for this year"s 50th Anniversary SEMA show, swathes of the planet"s elite tuners have been burning the midnight oil trying to get their cars prepped, finished and shipped to Vegas in time for the tuning show.One of those tuners being LTMW (LTMOTORWERKS), an LA-tuning outfit started by BMW nut, Long Tran. Long started making waves on the scene ten years ago, where he was chopping up Bee-Ems in his garage and turning them into wild project cars. Since then, his firm has grown from strength to strength and branched out. Since 2013, LTMW has become Liberty Walk"s official US shop while also being the place to go if you want a crazy Rocket Bunny, RWB or, for that matter, any crazy Japanese wide-body kit grafted onto your car. For this year"s show, Long and his crew have taken an angle grinder to a McLaren 650S and fitted a Liberty Walk widebody kit onto it. And if that"s not enough to send Ron Dennis into a tailspin, the fact that Mr. Liberty Walk, Kato-San, is also doing a 650S conversion just might.Liberty Walk"s been around since 1993, and at its birth represented something of a game-changer. Kato-san wanted to "change the perception of car workshops," and started selling bodykits for kei-cars, then became an American and supercar importer from his neon-lit premises in Japan, a few years ahead of the Max Power modifying scene, to which he owes his fortune.Subsequently, he sculpted a few bodykits for Lamborghinis, the popularity of which heralded a separate subdivision of the company called LB Performance. Now that name"s become a mainstay in the rarefied super-wide Hypercar tuning niche. One that"s spearheaded by Kato-san, who owns a custom Ferrari F40, the 458 pictured in the gallery above, and an Aventador.McLaren is the latest supercar manufacturer to be bitten by the Liberty Walk bug and is set to get a similar treatment. And with the rise of social media, the whole look" of wide/retro arches & rivnuts has gone a bit mental. Primarily, because taking an angle-grinder to the carbonfibre arches of a 200k+ supercar and drunkenly following a marker pen line to chop is, well, a bit mental.But SEMA builders don"t tend to do just one show car, they arrive with an armada of tuned stuff that rolls into Sin City to the sound of scraping carbonfibre chin spoilers.As you can see by clicking through the shots above, Long and his team have been busy on a few interesting projects. There"s an awesome S30 Datsun which, again, is owned by Kato-San and shipped over especially from Japan. Finished in a Shakotan/Bosozoku style, it"s got a crazy engine that sits on the redline, slick tyres and a hatred for sleeping policeman.Then there"s Long Tran"s personal car, an Audi R8 on air suspension and chopped up with wide arches. It"s the yin to the yang of that old school Nissan S14 with a Rocket Bunny" conversion and BMW engine-swap. It"s just one of five Rocket Bunny cars LMTW is taking, so a look that"s very much in fashion this year.Finally, if you look past the clouds of fibreglass dust, you"ll notice a BMW E36 shell that"s getting a drift-inspired makeover and an RB26 heart transplant. We just hope LMTW are sprinkling some magic on the bumper-less Porsche Boxster Spyder that looks incredibly sorry for itself. Now that"s a car that"ll really have the purists tearing their hair out if it gets a widebody look.But to see what they look like finished and under the shiny lights of SEMA, you"ll have to head back to TG.com later this week.Photos: Mark Riccioni
Date written: 1 Nov 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 5631
While we"ve been preparing a wide-arched and slammed Colin the Caterpillar cake for this year"s 50th Anniversary SEMA show, swathes of the planet"s elite tuners have been burning the midnight oil trying to get their cars prepped, finished and shipped to Vegas in time for the tuning show.One of those tuners being LTMW (LTMOTORWERKS), an LA-tuning outfit started by BMW nut, Long Tran. Long started making waves on the scene ten years ago, where he was chopping up Bee-Ems in his garage and turning them into wild project cars. Since then, his firm has grown from strength to strength and branched out. Since 2013, LTMW has become Liberty Walk"s official US shop while also being the place to go if you want a crazy Rocket Bunny, RWB or, for that matter, any crazy Japanese wide-body kit grafted onto your car. For this year"s show, Long and his crew have taken an angle grinder to a McLaren 650S and fitted a Liberty Walk widebody kit onto it. And if that"s not enough to send Ron Dennis into a tailspin, the fact that Mr. Liberty Walk, Kato-San, is also doing a 650S conversion just might.Liberty Walk"s been around since 1993, and at its birth represented something of a game-changer. Kato-san wanted to "change the perception of car workshops," and started selling bodykits for kei-cars, then became an American and supercar importer from his neon-lit premises in Japan, a few years ahead of the Max Power modifying scene, to which he owes his fortune.Subsequently, he sculpted a few bodykits for Lamborghinis, the popularity of which heralded a separate subdivision of the company called LB Performance. Now that name"s become a mainstay in the rarefied super-wide Hypercar tuning niche. One that"s spearheaded by Kato-san, who owns a custom Ferrari F40, the 458 pictured in the gallery above, and an Aventador.McLaren is the latest supercar manufacturer to be bitten by the Liberty Walk bug and is set to get a similar treatment. And with the rise of social media, the whole look" of wide/retro arches & rivnuts has gone a bit mental. Primarily, because taking an angle-grinder to the carbonfibre arches of a 200k+ supercar and drunkenly following a marker pen line to chop is, well, a bit mental.But SEMA builders don"t tend to do just one show car, they arrive with an armada of tuned stuff that rolls into Sin City to the sound of scraping carbonfibre chin spoilers.As you can see by clicking through the shots above, Long and his team have been busy on a few interesting projects. There"s an awesome S30 Datsun which, again, is owned by Kato-San and shipped over especially from Japan. Finished in a Shakotan/Bosozoku style, it"s got a crazy engine that sits on the redline, slick tyres and a hatred for sleeping policeman.Then there"s Long Tran"s personal car, an Audi R8 on air suspension and chopped up with wide arches. It"s the yin to the yang of that old school Nissan S14 with a Rocket Bunny" conversion and BMW engine-swap. It"s just one of five Rocket Bunny cars LMTW is taking, so a look that"s very much in fashion this year.Finally, if you look past the clouds of fibreglass dust, you"ll notice a BMW E36 shell that"s getting a drift-inspired makeover and an RB26 heart transplant. We just hope LMTW are sprinkling some magic on the bumper-less Porsche Boxster Spyder that looks incredibly sorry for itself. Now that"s a car that"ll really have the purists tearing their hair out if it gets a widebody look.But to see what they look like finished and under the shiny lights of SEMA, you"ll have to head back to TG.com later this week.Photos: Mark Riccioni
Date written: 1 Nov 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 5631
