People building amazing four-wheeled machines from scratch is sort of what Aussies and Kiwi spanner-spinners are best known for. Tales of genius people like Burt Munro are a frequent fixture in our twin histories, and so home-built racers are almost second nature.
But when the story centres on someone building a Ferrari Formula 1 replica — one that is road legal, no less — themselves, it's a big big deal.
The someone in question is an Aussie named Zac Mihajlovic. His name is probably quite foreign to most people, but it might ring a bell for those who follow the custom car scene over the ditch. That's because Mihajlovic's previous achievements include a rather well-known functional replica of the Batmobile from 1989's Batman flick.
Together with custom motorbike builder Scotty Cox, Mihajlovic has been plotting the various stages of his build over on Instagram since mid-2016. The name of the project? Zacaria.
It started with the engine; a 6.3-litre Ferrari V12 sourced from a written off F12 Berlinetta and shipped from the UK. It's since been mated to a six-speed Albins transmission (you might know of them, they're a supplier for the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship).
Since acquiring the engine, Mihajlovic and Cox have crafted the custom-made, all-aluminium body — which morphs around the power-train and the massive 345/30 Michelin rubber. And that includes wheel-arches on each corner; added to aid with making the package road legal.
Perhaps what makes tackling a project like this so impressive is that in the real world where real Formula 1 cars exist, they take teams of hundreds upon hundreds of engineers and designers to create, along with the inevitable huge budgets. That's not lost on Mihajlovic, either.
“If you wanted to drive a real F1 car it’d take a team of people to run it so I thought about a modern V8 or V12 from a Ferrari, there’s probably a market for people who want something no one else has,” he said, speaking to Which Car.
“So I thought, what’s the next-most extreme thing I could build to drive on the street? No one’s done it with an F1 car, they’ve done thing like the BAC Mono or the Ariel Atom, but they’re four-cylinder and look like concept cars.”
Inevitably, Mihajlovic has been probed about selling completed Zacarias. Once this one hits completion, he hopes to build more of them with pricing set to land in the AU$700,000 (NZ$763,000).
That's not bad, given you'd have to pay a whole heap more for the chance to drive the real deal — let alone own one.