The spacious and practical Volvo V50 is a perfect steer for those with an active lifestyle, and perhaps a family, a dog and a bunch of large sporting equipment. But when Garage Unique reinvented the formula as a wide-body Volvo V50 Hyper Wagon, well, that kinda changed its purpose…

Feature first appeared in Fast Car. Words: Dan Bevis. Photos: SerialOne

The idea of the practical supercar is one that’s been inspiring designers and dreamers for generations. It was the bedrock of Gordon Murray’s strategy for the McLaren F1 – not only was that to be the world’s fastest road car, but it had to have room for a couple of fully stocked golf bags too. And you’ve got a number of options as a buyer today; you can stick a roof box on your Koenigsegg Regera, attach a ski rack to an Audi R8, or just go the whole hog and shell out for a Ferrari GTC4 Lusso. But if you want to do it with a bit of flair and originality, you could do a lot worse than take a page from Smicha Thiramongkol’s book. This Bangkok-based master of the avant-garde took a strictly logical approach to the concept: what’s the most practical car you can buy? Well, for decades the go-to answer to that question has been ‘duh, a Volvo estate, obviously’, so that’s precisely where he started. And from that point onward, things got distinctly weird.

Now, the concept of cool Volvo estates has been a bit of a rocky road over the years. The car most people would probably first think of when the subject of Swedish barges arises, the old-school Volvo 240, is enjoying a bit of a retro renaissance right now, although back when it was new the model was always more of a functional box than it was an object of desire. There were two key estates that really provided the conceptual stepping stones to what we’re seeing here: one was the 850 T5-R (and subsequent 850R evolution), the car beloved of police forces across the globe which proved you could shove an Exocet missile in the back of a housebrick and make it handle. The fact that it was turned into a BTCC racer neatly proved the point. And the second was the original V40, debuting in 1995; this was a smooth and rounded estate car, which we always thought was a bit underrated and overlooked – it had the perfect proportions to look awesome with the simple addition of big rims and air-ride. And all of this led to the starting point for this particular project, the 2011 V50 estate. This Belgian-built box sits on the platform of the Ford Focus, and offers plentiful potential for modding mischief. Although, it has to be said, no-one’s ever thought to do quite what’s been done here before.

Smicha’s idea was as focused as it was inspired: to build a ‘Hyper Wagon’. The inspiration for this was, bizarrely, an obscure supercar by the name of the Lykan Hypersport. If you’ve not heard of it, this rare curio is another element in making this project truly intercontinental… we’ve already got a bit of Thailand, Sweden and Belgium in the mix, and now we’re looking to Lebanon. This is the home of W Motors, who built the Lykan Hypersport back in 2013-16, the first sports car to be designed and built in the Middle East – it had a RUF flat-six and diamond-encrusted headlights, but the element Smicha really wanted to channel inspiration from was the design of its nose. And so, with this slightly demented notion bubbling away, he went to call in on our old friends at Garage Unique.

You’ve probably heard that name once or twice. This Bangkok chop-shop is always busy hand-crafting unique builds, taking inspiration from the extreme bodykits of the 1990s and 2000s, fusing it with the contemporary widebody craze, and distilling it into a look that’s distinctly modern Thai. And while many bodyshops may look at you a bit funny if you take them a Volvo estate and ask them to make it look like a supercar, this is all just another day in the life of Garage Unique. The merry band of Asian provocateurs set about the makeover with gusto, hand-crafting a full custom front end to mimic the jutting aggression of the Hypersport, a move which totally reconfigures the shape to startling effect. It’s all beautifully crafted for a perfect fit, with extensive use of carbon fibre, and – as you’ve probably spotted – it’s not just about the nose job. Garage Unique also custom-made carbon sideskirts, flowing into the imposing wide arches at either end, while the tail enjoys a boisterously massive diffuser and, most early-2000s-ish of all, that frankly eye-watering roof spoiler. Have you ever seen anything like it? It’s wonderfully deranged, harnessing the spirit of the Lykan and taking it to strange new places.

Work of art

Naturally with great stance comes great responsibility, and the wide-body Volvo V50 needed those fat arches filled with something pretty tip-top. Smicha doesn’t disappoint here, drawing in the sumptuous treasures of WORK Wheels, specifically a staggered set of custom three-piece Meister S1s. It all kisses the tarmac with vivid enthusiasm thanks to a cunning air-ride setup courtesy of Hop-Up Airsus, taking some BC Racing BR Series coilovers and converting them to run bags. And the global reach of this concept reaches yet further as Japanese ingredients start to worm their way into the formula; the brakes are pure Mitsubishi – sitting on custom hubs we find the Brembos from an Evo VIII at the front and an Evo X at the rear – and inside the cabin resides a pair of Recaro CL7s sourced from a Honda Accord Type R. Richly diverse ingredients, but all fused in glorious harmony.

The idea of building a wide-body Volvo V50 may have been barking mad, but the execution is flawless and the finished product is like an acid trip on the school run – at once sensible and practical, and utterly unhinged. What better way is there to snag trophies at the show-and-shine on the way home from picking up your Billy bookcases from Ikea? And the best part is that this build is a true, global one-off. Sure, only seven Lykan Hypersports were ever built, selling for $3.4m apiece… but how many V50 Hyper Wagons are there in existence? Just one. That uniqueness is priceless.

Tech Spec: Wide-body Volvo V50

Styling:

Custom ‘Hyper Wagon’ bodykit by Garage Unique – inc. Lykan Hypersport-style front end, front bumper and carbon splitter, carbon canards, wide wings front and rear, carbon sideskirts, roof spoiler and carbon rear diffuser, custom angel eyes

Tuning:

B4204S5 2.0-litre 16v petrol, front-mount intercooler (turbo conversion to come), 6-speed auto, FWD

Chassis:

9.5x18in -5 (front) and 11x18in -20 (rear) WORK Meister S1 wheels, 225/40 (f) and 265/35 (r) Toyo R888 tyres, BC Racing BR Series coilovers – converted to airbags by Hop-Up Airsus, Mitsubishi Evo VIII front Brembo calipers with 330mm discs and custom hubs, Mitsubishi Evo X rear Brembo calipers with 320mm discs and custom hubs

Interior:

Honda Accord Type R Recaro CL7 seats, Viair gauges and air-ride controls in centre console

The Mitsubishi GTO may not have been a roaring success in the nineties, but this second bite of the cherry has been cunningly masterminded in Thailand. This is like no modified Mitsubishi GTO you’ve ever seen before…

Feature take from Fast Car magazine. Words: Dan Bevis. Photos: Serial One

We need to talk about the Mitsubishi GTO. This is a car which deserves to be remembered more fondly than it is. Marketed in the UK as the Mitsubishi 3000GT (for copyright reasons), the car that was elsewhere known by the iconic Gran Turismo Omologato name has become the butt of many a journalistic joke these days. It’s fashionable to disregard it as a flabby irrelevance, a pseudo-sports car that was made undesirably heavy by all of its complex technology – all-wheel-drive, four-wheel steering, automatically adjustable aero, adaptive suspension and so on. But in an age when such things were found on many a high-end supercar, perhaps it’s time to reassess the GTO… and consider that maybe it was just well ahead of its time?

The model certainly launched at a peculiar time for the Japanese motor industry. It all comes down to, weirdly, Detroit, where things were looking a bit iffy in the early-1990s. The celebrated names of iconic manufacturers were being diluted by crap cars which couldn’t hold a candle to their desirable forebears; emissions regs and boardroom-directed design were ruining everything. The fifth-generation Chevrolet Monte Carlo was a soggy mess that turned its back on its name’s legendary roots; ditto the Pontiac Grand Am and the Buick Riviera. What the disillusioned Stateside masses needed was a new generation of coupés that looked cool, and went as well as they looked. And Japan was only too happy to provide…

While the good ol’ boys struggled to wring 150bhp from their asthmatic V6 motors, rising-sun engineers had figures approximately double that in their crosshairs, and furthermore there was unprecedented chassis development going on behind the scenes. The US market was wide open for invasion, and world domination would surely follow. Toyota had begun their development programme for the Mk4 Supra in 1989, and by mid-1990 it was all done-and-dusted, slated for production later in the year – but then Nissan entered with a comedy sidestep and a wry grin, unleashed their super-advanced Z32 300ZX, and sent Toyota’s designers scurrying back to their flipcharts. The fledgling supercoupé market quickly escalated into an arms race, the United States its primary battleground. Mitsubishi entered the fray with their techno-tastic GTO, and all bets were off when Honda strode in with the NSX. Not so much a supercoupé as a full-blown supercar, it changed the landscape of everyday-usable performance forever.

These, then, were the big-four of the nineties supercoupé phenomenon. But today, we find almost all of the focus on the NSX and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Supra, while the 300ZX enjoys its own niche appeal among marque aficionados. But the GTO/3000GT? You really don’t hear a lot of people cheering for this also-ran curio. Posterity has all but forgotten it.

Salvation, however, is at hand, thanks to a particularly enthusiastic Bangkok-based GTO owner by the name of Songklod Upala. It’s his car you see here, and as has no doubt already made itself immediately obvious, this isn’t exactly how it rolled off the Okazaki production line in the mid-nineties. No, a few things have changed here, and it’s all thanks to those cunning carbonsmiths over at Garage Unique.

‘Garage who…?’ you may ask. Well, as regular readers should be aware, Garage Unique is the go-to place for extreme Thai modding and tuning, with all sorts of high-end makeovers rumbling malevolently out of their roller shutters. It’s a name which deserves to be better known across the world (much like the GTO, in fact) as, while kingpins like Liberty Walk, Rocket Bunny, RWB and so forth are pretty much household names, Garage Unique is just as adept at crafting cleverly conceived and beautifully finished bodykits for any car you care to mention. The unique hook here is that as well as being fully in-house work, these carbon fibre kits are created as one-offs for customer commissions. You may remember the Volvo V50 wagon we featured in a recent issue, for which the owner had requested a visual refresh inspired by the obscure Lykan Hypersport supercar? Yeah, that’s pretty much the vibe. So when Songklod was after a modern-era widebody kit for his GTO, and found nothing available off-the-shelf, he knew exactly where to turn.

It’s also worth noting that this car is the full-fat model. The GTO was sold in either naturally-aspirated or twin-turbo form, and it’s the latter we have here. The good one. The exciting one. Right out of the box, we’re talking 276bhp in launch spec… and, as anyone who spent their youth obsessively poring over comparative bhp figures in Gran Turismo and is aware of Japanese manufacturers’ ‘gentleman’s agreement’ will know, this particular number usually implies rather a lot more. Indeed, Mitsubishi themselves admitted it when the GTO was facelifted in 1994, publishing a peak output of 320bhp. Spicy

So the base for the project was strong, and Garage Unique was well placed to amp it up. The bumpers you see here are full custom jobs, liberally sprinkled with carbon flicks, canards and splitters, and the bonnet is a bespoke creation too. Where this bodykit differs from what’s been tried before by the handful of people who’ve attempted this sort of GTO chicanery is that, instead of junking the OEM front and rear wings and totally replacing them with aftermarket wideboy items, Garage Unique has cleverly integrated these wide arches into the original wings, accentuating and re-shaping to flow beautifully into the new bumpers. Sure, it would have been easier to do it the other way, but where’s the challenge in that? And the finished product here achieves something truly masterful: while some critics may speculate that the GTO’s design hasn’t aged especially well and looks somewhat blobby alongside its supercoupé contemporaries, you could never say that about this one. This custom creation retains enough of the classic design elements to make it immediately obvious it’s a GTO to those who know what they’re looking for (the headlights, for example, and the window line and the door handles), but otherwise entirely reimagines the body to make it look thoroughly 2020s-ish.

It’s got the show to match the inherent go, then – and things are equally impressive beneath the skin. We’ve discussed how hyper intelligent the GTO’s chassis is in stock factory form, and to this Songklod has added a custom air-ride setup, courtesy of the suspension eggheads at Hop-Up Airsus. This allows the retro-nouveau form to air out gloriously over its fat WORK Emotion CR-2P wheels, a setup that’s interestingly staggered not in width, but in offset. On paper it’s a ‘square’ setup, measuring 10.5×19-inches all round (which makes sense when you’re talking AWD), but the front and rear offsets are -24 and -37 respectively, helping to achieve the on-point stance the car effortlessly pulls off. Those bespoke broad arches are filled out perfectly. The picture is completed by a splendidly trimmed interior, all finished in Alcantara with Garage Unique’s own bucket seat design.

So this is arguably the perfect modified Mitsubishi GTO. It takes all of the egghead tech of the original, and reframes it within an astonishing and awe-inspiring modern body design. If you weren’t a fan of the GTO, you will be now. The Mitsi supercoupé’s time has finally come, and it’s all bubbling up in Bangkok.

Tech Spec: Modified Mitsubishi GTO

Styling:

Full custom Garage Unique bodykit inc. custom bumpers and aero, and custom wide-arches blended with original wings

Tuning:

6G72 3.0-litre DOHC 24v V6 twin-turbo

Chassis:

10.5×19” ET-24 (front) and 10.5×19” ET-37 (rear) WORK Emotion CR-2P stepped-rim wheels, 265/30 Kumho PS91 tyres, custom air suspension by Hop-Up Airsus

Interior:

Garage Unique bucket seats, Vertex steering wheel, full Alcantara retrim including dash, rollcage