Reconstruction

Words by: Alexi Smith Photos by: Mark Pakula

It’s been a long time coming, but STYLZ has taken the old and made it new again.

Six years is a long time when building a car in the Auto Salon scheme of things. Popular styles of body, paint, wheels and themes are constantly shifting, and it’s hard enough to just keep up with the current trends before you can even consider becoming an innovator. Anyone who dedicates a long time to building up a show car usually requires the foresight of a tarot card, crystal ball and even tea-leaf reader to ensure the end result is worth all of the time and money, and can draw in trophies and prizes rather than jeers and scoffs from the show-going public. There are quite a few builders who have been around for a while and have built two, three or more trophy-winning rides, but they have often taken an evolutionary approach over a few years rather than building everything in one go over a long period.

Improving a car in staged increments means more time can be spent collecting a few trophies while displaying the car in shows, as well as seeing how it fares against competitors, giving a builder even more time to plan the next killer mod. George Karanfilovski’s 1993 Honda CRX falls under the riskiest modifying style of all, having endured a comparatively long build-up of over six years. Not only can some of the choices you make in the past end up spoiling the rest of the car if your vision isn’t distinct enough, but somebody else could even jump in first and pull off the very look you were working so hard to achieve before you had a chance to complete the car. The only choice then, is to aim for something so extreme that nobody else would even have a chance of catching up.

Inspired by the efficient, compact performance of Honda’s CRX and the proven potential of it to be both a trophy winner and dyno rocket once the VTEC engine receives a bit of boost, George bought a standard and very clean 1993 model before doing nothing short of stripping it to a bare shell and bolting it up to a rotisserie. “I chose this car because I thought it would look fully sick modified,” George said jokingly.

From the beginning, there was no intention of keeping the build limited to the immediately visible parts of the car. It was going to be a complete build, encompassing every aspect of modification with as many new and never-before-seen innovations as possible. Having easy access to all corners of the shell made it simple to perform the first stage of the build; applying a complete coat of PPG’s silver-to-green colour-shifting Harlequin paint to parts of the car that would require the viewer to have a hoist, a mirror or a pair of knees to see.