Category Archives: Story

Story

The Z4 Coupe BMW Never Built—Rendered in Carbon Fiber and What-Ifs

BMW once sold a Z4 Coupe—the squat, polarizing E86 that enthusiasts now remember fondly, if not unanimously. Fast-forward to the current G29 generation and the idea of a fixed-roof Z4 quietly died on the product-planning table. No metal top. No shooting-brake redemption arc. Just a soft-top roadster sharing its bones with the Toyota Supra.

And yet, at SEMA of all places, someone decided that wasn’t good enough.

What rolled onto the show floor wasn’t a concept sketch or a corporate tease, but a fully realized one-off that blurs the already fuzzy line between Munich and Toyota City. Think of it as the Z4 Coupe BMW never built—by way of a Supra donor car and a face swap that answers a question nobody in a boardroom wanted to ask.

At its core, this creation is Toyota’s GR Supra, but with a BMW nose grafted on like an alternate-universe OEM option. The result looks surprisingly cohesive, which is both impressive and mildly irritating if you’re the kind of enthusiast who still wonders why these cars weren’t offered in both body styles to begin with. BMW roundels replace Toyota badges, a carbon-fiber engine cover wears M Power branding with the familiar tri-color stripes, and the aftermarket hits are unapologetically loud: 20-inch BBS wheels, quad exhaust outlets, and enough visual drama to stop foot traffic.

The mashup unintentionally highlights one of the strangest product decisions of the modern sports-car era. The Z4 is roadster-only, complete with a folding fabric roof. The Supra? Coupe-only. Same platform. Same factory—Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria. Different philosophies. Officially, no one ever explained why. Unofficially, it smells like internal cannibalization paranoia. Toyota may have worried a Z4 Coupe would steal Supra thunder, while BMW likely feared a convertible Supra nibbling at Z4 sales. The result was a gentleman’s agreement that left enthusiasts shortchanged on both sides.

BMW did flirt with the idea of fixing that mistake. The 2023 Concept Touring Coupe—more modern clownshoe than traditional two-door—proved the company knew exactly what it was doing, stylistically speaking. Rumors of a limited 50-car run at around €250,000 swirled for months before quietly evaporating. The Z4 M40i-based coupe never escaped the concept-car purgatory where good ideas go to die.

Now it’s 2026, and the clock is running out. Both the Z4 and Supra are heading toward retirement, with final production wrapping up soon at Magna Steyr’s Graz plant. BMW isn’t committing to another Z4, while Toyota insists the Supra will return someday—presumably without BMW DNA in its bloodstream.

This isn’t a clean breakup, though. BMW and Toyota are still very much talking, just about hydrogen instead of horsepower. The upcoming 2028 BMW iX5 60H xDrive will use a fuel-cell system co-developed with Toyota, proof that the partnership lives on even as the sports cars fade away.

Toyota, for its part, isn’t done playing. A GR GT supercar with a twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 is already in the works, and executives keep teasing the return of icons like the MR2 and Celica. BMW, meanwhile, is retreating to safer ground, focusing on high-volume models and letting the M2 and an upcoming gas-powered next-gen M3 (internally known as G84) carry the enthusiast banner.

Which makes this SEMA-built Z4/Supra hybrid feel less like a novelty and more like a missed opportunity cast in carbon fiber. It’s not just a cool one-off—it’s a reminder of what happens when enthusiasts imagine the cars that corporate caution wouldn’t allow.

Photos: mysupraadventures / Instagram

Story

Ringbrothers Just Redefined What a British Muscle Car Could Be

Ringbrothers has always operated in that sweet spot between genius and mild lunacy—the place where creativity flourishes because nobody stops to ask whether something is sensible. The Wisconsin-based brothers, Jim and Mike Ring, built their reputation turning American muscle cars into carbon-fiber fever dreams that somehow still drive like cars rather than science projects. They started with an autobody shop. They stayed with an autobody shop. And then, almost accidentally, they became the most interesting restomod builders on the planet.

So when one half of the duo showed up at The Quail during Monterey Car Week standing next to a radically reimagined Aston Martin DBS, it felt less like a left turn and more like destiny finally catching up.

Meet “Octavia.” No, not a Škoda—though apparently the name caused a mild tightening of legal neckties somewhere in Europe. This is Ringbrothers’ vision of what Aston Martin’s early-1970s DBS might have been if it were raised on cheeseburgers, superchargers, and a steady diet of American V-8 thunder.

“We’ve combined the ferocity of American muscle with the stiff upper lip of English sophistication,” Mike Ring says, deadpan but clearly delighted. “Octavia is beyond anything we’ve built before.”

That’s not marketing fluff. This thing is unhinged in the most deliberate way.

Googling Their Way to James Bond

The origin story is peak Ringbrothers. A local client—described as “super cool,” which in Ring-speak usually means extremely patient and financially brave—asked a simple question: What do you guys want to build?

The answer, apparently, came from a Google search.

“We literally Googled ‘European muscle car,’” Mike admits. “A DBS was at the top, and we’re like, yeah dude, we want to do James Bond.”

Within a week, the owner bought a non-running 1971 DBS off Bring a Trailer. Ringbrothers had never seen one in person. That didn’t slow them down. If anything, it emboldened them.

“They’re so flat-sided,” Mike says. “Straight away we knew we had to put some booty on the back.”

Carbon Fiber, Not Rivets

“Some booty” turned into ten inches of added width. The finished car measures a staggering 82 inches wide at the rear and 78 inches up front—roughly modern supercar territory and not far off a Lamborghini Revuelto for sheer presence.

The difference is execution. This isn’t a bolt-on widebody with exposed fasteners and wishful thinking. Every panel was designed in CAD and formed entirely in carbon fiber. The proportions stay intact, the surfacing flows, and the car somehow looks more Aston than the original while being dramatically more aggressive.

“It still looks balanced,” Mike says—and annoyingly, he’s right.

From CAD screen to finished car took roughly two and a half years, with about a year of actual assembly once parts began arriving. The original DBS shell didn’t survive in any recognizable sense. Ringbrothers stripped it down, bonded the body together, and turned what remained into—yes—a martini bar.

“It’s a James Bond thing,” Mike shrugs. “We got to serve martinis.”

Forget the Straight-Six

Purists, look away now.

Octavia does not run an Aston engine. Not even close. Early conversations with Aston Martin didn’t go anywhere—Ringbrothers is refreshingly candid about that—so they pivoted to what they know best.

Enter Ford’s 5.0-liter Coyote V-8, topped with a 2.65-liter supercharger and good for 805 horsepower. It’s bolted to a six-speed manual gearbox and sends power exclusively to the rear wheels, because of course it does.

“The last thing we want to do is build something we can’t make run,” Mike says. “We’re not engineers.”

That statement becomes increasingly hilarious the longer you look at the rest of the car.

The drivetrain lives in a bespoke chassis with the wheelbase stretched by 76 millimeters. A full structural roll cage is integrated into the body. There’s independent rear suspension, C7 Corvette sway bars, Fox Racing dampers, and Brembo brakes. This is not a hot rod pretending to be a grand tourer—it’s a genuinely serious piece of hardware wearing a Savile Row suit.

Coke-Bottle Bond Villain Energy

The design work was led by Gary Ragle, with what Ringbrothers describes as “echoes” of William Towns’ original DBS shape buried in the final form. The goal was “Coke-bottle curvature,” and they nailed it. The car looks taut, muscular, and vaguely menacing, like a Bond villain’s personal transport after an intense off-screen gym montage.

Inside, the madness continues—tastefully. Carbon fiber, stainless steel, and leather dominate, with subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to 007 lore. The standout? A dipstick handle shaped like a martini glass. Shaken, presumably, not stirred.

The Cost of Doing It Because You Want To

As for the price, Mike won’t give a number. Not because he’s being coy—but because he genuinely doesn’t seem to know.

“We’re trying to sell another one so we can spread the cost a bit,” he says. “It was quite expensive.”

That might be the understatement of the week. The raw stainless steel for the exhaust tips alone cost $1,000. A first quote for four pieces of glass came in at $92,000. That’s not a typo.

Still, Ringbrothers isn’t interested in efficiency, scalability, or anything else you’d find in a business-school case study.

“If I had to build the same car over and over, I wouldn’t be doing it,” Mike says. “I’d lose interest. If it was all about money, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

Why Ringbrothers Matters

That’s the secret sauce. Ringbrothers doesn’t chase trends or algorithms or easy wins. They chase curiosity. Every project is an extension of their taste, their humor, and their willingness to learn by doing—sometimes publicly, sometimes expensively.

Mike doesn’t see himself as an artist. He sees himself as lucky. Lucky to work with his wife. Lucky that his son is now involved in the machining side. Lucky to keep building cars simply because he wants to.

“I don’t want to retire,” he says. “This is what I’d do if I was retired.”

Octavia isn’t just a spectacular Aston Martin restomod. It’s a manifesto—proof that the best automotive creations still come from people who care more about having fun than getting rich.

They’re not curing cancer, as Mike puts it. They’re just building ridiculously cool cars.

And honestly? The world needs more of that.

Source: TopGear

Story

How a Swiss traffic cop accidentally made some of the greatest car photography ever

Car and Driver has spent decades obsessing over motion—0–60 times, lateral g, the poetry of a perfect apex. Arnold Odermatt did the opposite. He photographed the moment after everything went wrong. And somehow, by standing still for thirteen seconds at a time, he captured the soul of the automobile age more clearly than most people chasing speed ever did.

Odermatt wasn’t an artist, at least not by job description. He was a police officer in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden, a place so tidy and tranquil it feels engineered by a focus group. Starting in 1948, he spent more than forty years documenting accidents and crime scenes on its roads—quiet two-lanes, mountain passes, intersections that look harmless until physics intervenes. These images weren’t meant for gallery walls. They were evidence. Insurance exhibits. Visual footnotes to written police reports.

And yet, decades later, they hang in museums.

Around thirteen seconds—that’s how long each exposure took. In an era of magnesium flash cartridges and Rolleiflex cameras mounted to tripods, there was no spray-and-pray. You didn’t “chimp” a shot. You committed. Odermatt took tens of thousands of photographs this way, lighting night-time wrecks so completely they looked like daylight, freezing bent steel, cracked glass, and stunned landscapes with clinical clarity.

Before all this, he trained as a baker. Health issues forced a career change, and the Nidwalden police gained something they didn’t know they needed: Switzerland’s first dedicated police photographer. Odermatt even built himself a darkroom in an old toilet at the Stans police station, which feels perfectly on-brand for a man who valued function over romance.

His philosophy was brutally simple. “A good photograph is in focus; you have to be able to see everything you want.” No blur, no drama lighting, no editorializing. Just precision. The same mindset engineers bring to brake calipers or steering racks. Odermatt treated every scene like a mechanical problem that had already failed, and his job was to show exactly how.

The cars in these photos—Saabs, Opels, Peugeots, anonymous sedans—are rarely the point, yet they’re impossible to ignore. They lie twisted against trees, folded around poles, improbably perched on embankments. What’s striking isn’t gore or chaos, but order. The wrecks look composed, almost polite, as if even disaster in Switzerland obeys regulations.

For decades, no one outside the local courts cared. Then, in the early 1990s, chance intervened. Odermatt’s son, Urs, while researching a film, stumbled across his father’s vast archive of negatives. What he found wasn’t documentation—it was art. Quiet, absurd, tragic, sometimes darkly funny art that spoke volumes about cars, roads, and the fragile pact between humans and machines.

The international art world agreed. In 2001, legendary curator Harald Szeemann selected 32 photographs from Odermatt’s Karambolage series for the Venice Biennale. From there, the exhibitions snowballed—Paris, New York, beyond. The retired traffic cop became an internationally recognized artist without ever changing how he worked. Same photos. New audience.

Odermatt lived long enough to enjoy it. He died in 2021 at 95, having watched the ordinary work of his career become extraordinary in hindsight. Today, his photographs reside in museum collections around the world, time capsules from an era when cars were simpler, roads were quieter, and consequences were still very real.

On what would have been his 100th birthday, Berlin’s Springer Gallery is marking the milestone with a major exhibition running through January 31, 2026. It’s a fitting tribute—not just to a photographer, but to an accidental historian of the automobile.

Because if you really want to understand cars, don’t just look at how they move. Look at how they stop.

Source: Galerie Springer Berlin