Just a few weeks ago, we were stunned to discover the newest creation from Speedycop Lemons race team, the “Trippy Tippy Hippy Van.”
Now we finally get a chance to see it in action, courtesy of Ridiculous Rides.
Through the years, Jeff Bloch, aka Speedycop, has been building some of the wildest race cars in the series – including an upside-down Chevy Camaro – and now he’s gone sideways, quite literally. No, we’re not talking about drifting sideways (anyone can do that with a VW bus!), but a tilted sideways microbus.
The team found a 1976 bay window bus that has been sitting in a Tennessee field for close to 20 years, rotated it and fastened it to a 1988 Rabbit, with a 16-valve GTI engine. According to Bloch, the 120-hp engine can launch it to 60 mph in around 8 seconds and reach a top speed of 100 mph – if you can muster the bravery to do so.
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In order to, you know, see, the top and bottom of the van were removed. But rather than just leave it, they added Lexan panels with pictures of a real microbus’s underside printed onto it. There’s also a picture of a trippy hippy glued onto the windshield.
It took Jeff and The Gang of Outlaws a thousand man-hours in the course of five weeks to build, and the team ran it at the “Kentucky (Demo) Derby” at National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park, in Bowling Green, Kentucky with great success. They ran 224 laps of the 2-mile road course without any serious reliability issues. The only problem seemed to be that since it is top-heavy, in hard cornering it tries to tip over on its side – which in this case, is actually the roof…
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