The story of Steve McHugh, the man behind the radical Nova kit car we initially posted on a lark (and because we're automotive sadists) just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. Steve recently emailed us to let us in on a little secret — he's been building crazy-ass cars for nigh on twenty-eight years now. Since 1980, Steve's been applying his personal style of vehicular extremism to anything he can get his hands on. He even sent us pictures of this favorites. Heck, we'll let him tell you all about it below, along with more pics of Steve's marvelous mechanical masterpieces.
Hi all, Here are some pics of my past works all done without garage, on my drive. I started on a bike licence back in 1980 so I built my tree wheeler ODYSSEY, a well known car around the custom scene, winning many trophies and most radical at Blackpool indoor show. It had a roof chop to the front roof gullwing doors and a 1600 type 3 VW variant engine and transaxle .
Next was my standard 8, it was a 4 door but i chopped the roof and made a 2 door coupe, it ran a 3.1 V6 with a Jag rear axle narrowed. I then built a one off V12 creation based on a hand built chassis and a bond bug body which sat in front of the steering wheels. All the running gear was out of a Jaguar.
After a long spell away from cars I got Calibra once again, so i built myself a body kit for this car. It featured in Max Power Top 100 at the NEC and got featured in Total Vauxhall. I then acquired the Nova, I intended to do a Ferrari Enzo lookalike but got somewhat side tracked. The car is still not finished, but I did enough bodywork to get the MOT to enable me to get to shows. I can't say when it will be finished as I am to reluctant to take it off the road since I am having too much fun driving it about. The car has just won Discovery Channel's Chop Shop London Garage, UK's Wildest Ride, they plan to do a write up on my work to coincide with a new series out soon.
Hope this is of some interest to you. Once again thanks for the attention, I understand people's mixed feeling about the car but it is what it is, my bit of fun, and surely that's all that counts.
Thanks, Steve