Have you ever sat back and considered what it takes to be a pioneer? If it is true that we are all products of our environment, then what is it about some folks who go far beyond the norm and provide a brand-new way of looking at things?
The kit car industry has been around since the late 1940s (when fiberglass was first introduced) and gained popularity in the '60s and '70s. But that fact is true only for the United States and England. Elsewhere in the world, though you can find them, kits are more often than not something of an anomaly.
Outside the U.S. and Britain, cars are just vehicles used to transport people and things between point A and point B. So to make a personal statement by building a car from scratch is virtually unheard of in many parts of the world, especially in the Third World. This includes the Dominican Republic, the second largest island in the Caribbean, where Diego Grullon has lived all 37 of his years.
But Diego is personally on the threshold of a new era. For most of his life, he's dreamed of building his own car from the ground up. When he was 20 (in '90) he received coverage in his local newspaper for building a Bondo and cardboard scale model of a car he designed himself (not something you'd find everyday in Santo Domingo).
We all may have doodled on paper and come up with some type of dream car when we were growing up, but keep in mind no car has ever been built from scratch in the Dominican Republic, and everything carwise in the country has to be imported. So when Diego decided in 2002 to build a full-size car for himself, it was going to be a job no one else in his country had done.
Most of the time in construction, whether it be a house or a car, you can go to someone or somewhere and get the advice of those who have encountered the regular problems you might have in that endeavor. But because no one Diego could find had ever undertaken what he was about to do, it made for a difficult decision: to invest a lot of time and money in something that may not turn out the way he wanted it to. But after spending years thinking and agonizing about whether he should or shouldn't, Diego figured it would be better if he tried rather than just think about it forever.
Diego had constructed a small-scale station buck back in the late '90s, and spent some time with racer Luis Mendez working on a GT racing team. He visited race shops and took pictures of frames and bodies, gaining a general knowledge of how a supercar should be set up. He'd already been poring over whatever European car magazines he could find, and ever since he was a small boy when his mother, Jeannette, would buy him toy cars, he'd been amazed by the shape of Porsche 917 and 962s, wanting to someday drive one of them on the street instead of the racetrack.
But the wheels didn't start turning for this project until after he had a bad experience with a local BMW dealer. Diego had saved his money and bought a new M3, and after owning it only five months, took it back to the dealer due to some engine problems incurred at the factory. They kept his car for a month. It got to the point Diego had to hire a German translator to write a letter to BMW's president in Germany! What's worse, when the dealer was out on the street testing Diego's car, they wrecked it! A long battle was drawn out over the difference between what Diego felt the car was worth and what the dealer thought, but with the money Diego received from the settlement, he decided to build his dream car.
He initially thought the project would take about a year, but it ended up taking four, and a lot more money, too. Though he had no garage (just a one-car, three-wall carport attached to the house he shares with his mother), Diego began his project by building a full-size station buck from plywood. The buck took six months to complete, and since he'd made no front elevation sketches, he winged it when he created his car's center area, starting with the windshield and working out from there. The windshield shape would give him a degree of layback for the A-posts, which would in turn give him the roof's shape. The side glass would be flat, and no rear glass would be needed.
The car's general shape was dictated by Diego's earlier drawings, and the location for the wheel openings was based on observations he'd made of a Toyota MR2, from which he intended to use both the drivetrain and suspension pieces. With the buck completed, he and his friend and righthand man on the project, Juan Ovalle, used polyurethane foam to fill the space between the stations, then covered the entire car with a skim coat of Bondo (check the photo layout starting on page 22 of this magazine for the complete series of construction photos).
The next step was to build the molds and pull body pieces in order to assemble an entire car. Through some trial and error, he was eventually able to get all the body sections made. In '04 Diego purchased a '95 MR2 and began designing a chassis to accommodate the parts. But for a reality check, keep in mind that electricity, at least as a 24-hour source, is not guaranteed in the Dominican Republic, and is both rare (as is the 220-volt current needed to power a welder) and expensive.
Diego was able to get a sponsorship from a local construction company that allowed him to use one of their generator/welders while he and Ovalle built his chassis. He also made good use of two books: Chassis Engineering (by Herb Adams) and Fiberglass & Composite Materials (by D. Aird Forbes). That, plus the time he'd spent examining all those race car chassis, paid off, as the pair was able to design and construct an appropriate base from which to hang the drivetrain and suspension.
Once the chassis was fitted with all of its parts and the body hung, Diego decided to debut his creation at the Association of Handcrafted Automobiles' 2005 Fun In The Sun event at Knott's Berry Farm in Southern California. As anyone who has ever picked a date to finish a car by knows, the days are long and expensive leading up to the occasion. Diego, who owns a sign shop that makes banners and billboards, neglected his business for four months (to the point where his regular customers thought he'd gone out of business) while he worked to finish the project. The arduous and expensive task of getting the car out of his country, into and across the United States with a Jeep and an open trailer, and finally to the show in SoCal was worthy of a chapter in Homer's Iliad!