Build the Perfect Beast: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made

Rating:
Summary: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made!
Review: A joyous ride down the rocky road of modern car design, with a pack of inspired lunatics fronted by Christensen (The Sweeps, not reviewed), on a journey to "build the greatest car in the world." By the greatest car, what Christensen is really talking about is speed: "I want to keep my dream car's mission simple: A) Start; B) Hit the horizon." The designer, Nick Pugh, a prodigy in the car-of-the-future department, speaks convincingly of automotive art ("I want my car to make sense the way a cloud makes sense or a tree, design with nonlinear symmetry. . . . Like a babe who has soft curves but talon nails, who could maybe kill you"), but when Christensen chats up the idea of beauty, he sounds like a junior-high kid trying to convince his mother to subscribe to Playboy for the great fiction it prints. For Christensen splices into this classily hip story of building the Xeno III (the greatest car ever made) his history as a fool for fast cars-a disease he has harbored since he was eight and one that has run through his life like a mighty, naughty river, shaping him, getting him into endless trouble. When a friend ponies up $100,000 for him to build the car, Christensen admits: "I feel what Leopold must have felt when he met Loeb," and it just gets worse. In tandem the stories proceed: Christensen the young boy frustrated because he never has car enough; Christensen the middle-aged guy frustrated because he never has money enough ($100,000 won't even buy the front bumpers on the car his team envisions). While the Xeno III does get built, in a stop-and-go process akin to learning the clutch, the real beauty of this story is the extended portrait Christensen paints of the family he grew up with and the family he now inhabits as a husband and father. A gorgeous love song to swift cars-parents will want to keep it away from their teenaged sons.

Rating:
Summary: I was there
Review: As someone who was involved in this project, the story is unbelievable but true. It is trully amazing to me that the car was ever built after so many years of frustration, but it was.
... The finished car is mindboggling and has received great press as a car and work of art. Nick Pugh is a genius and deserves all the credit in the end to complete the car when he could have walked away from it a hundred times. There is nothing like preserverance and a dream to overcome every sort of obstacle imaginable starting with no money. Durring the Don Quiote journey no one knew how Mark Christensen would interpret this ordeal. It was so painful for so many years. The finished book was very different then I would have imagined it to be. No one involved saw any of Mark's writing until the book was printed. But then again Mark has a amazing way of seeing events unfold from his own perspective. Please read the book. I think you will find it great read.

Rating:
Summary: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made!
Review: Build the Perfect Beast is the story of Mark Christensen's 5-year effort to fulfill his childhood dream: Build the perfect hot rod. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Christensen wanted to drive one of those high-performance street machines that all the California cool kids drove. As a high school or college student, however, he never had the talent or money to put together his dream vehicle. He never got past the tearing down part of the process. Until he met Nick Pugh, a talented young designer who has, since the events described in this book, gone on to bigger successes. The dream car Mark and Nick set out to build is the Xeno, a million-dollar one-of-a-kind fantasy on wheels. The book details the ups and downs -- mostly brief ups followed by prolonged downs -- of this process. Mark, an author, not an engineer, has vision to spare. Nick, a brilliant designer, refuses to let engineering realities interfere with his vision. The people that are attracted to the plan, lend their financing, and then walk away, are captured by the vision and become true believers, but, inevitably, are driven away by the complexities and vagaries of the other people involved. Mark puts himself into debt financing the car -- they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money, and that of investors, trying to make the car work. Less a story of personal triumph than a story of the weary reality of chasing a dream, this book is nonetheless satisfying to read. In the end, the car is built, but not the way anyone planned, and not the way anyone wanted.

Along with the engineering, design, and financial issues that haunt the protagonists, Christensen also weaves his own biography into the story, describing his lifelong dream of hotrods from grade school through the present [the book ends about 1995]. I found the biographical story more interesting than the car story, but by the end they have weaved together into a whole.

Rating:
Summary: Almost great
Review: It is almost great, and I don't think it's Christensen's fault that it isn't. It is clearly the portrait of an obsession that consumed his life--all his money, his home, his family, but frankly, the editing leaves something to be desired. Several times while reading this book I turned to my wife--an editor--to ask if a confusing passage made any sense. It never did. This is a terrible frustration in an otherwise engrossing book.

In a way, it reflects the naivete that Christensen himself exhibits--why did a man who, frankly, knows almost nothing about cars think he can shanghai one of the most brilliant young designers of his generation and build a supercar for peanuts? Because he didn't know any better, is why. It's the same reason he doesn't know you can't run a car on water, and why you can't expect to raise millions of dollars without some sort of business, and why he gets suckered in by half the shysters in California. The force of his will and his dream are almost enough to overcome the obstacles of his ignorance and blind faith. If I had a million dollars, Mark, I'd give it to you.

Rating:
Summary: Almost great
Review: It is almost great, and I don't think it's Christensen's fault that it isn't. It is clearly the portrait of an obsession that consumed his life--all his money, his home, his family, but frankly, the editing leaves something to be desired. Several times while reading this book I turned to my wife--an editor--to ask if a confusing passage made any sense. It never did. This is a terrible frustration in an otherwise engrossing book.

In a way, it reflects the naivete that Christensen himself exhibits--why did a man who, frankly, knows almost nothing about cars think he can shanghai one of the most brilliant young designers of his generation and build a supercar for peanuts? Because he didn't know any better, is why. It's the same reason he doesn't know you can't run a car on water, and why you can't expect to raise millions of dollars without some sort of business, and why he gets suckered in by half the shysters in California. The force of his will and his dream are almost enough to overcome the obstacles of his ignorance and blind faith. If I had a million dollars, Mark, I'd give it to you.

Rating:
Summary: The inner workings of making a dream come true
Review: OK, I have dreams of some day building my own super car with a massive mid mounted V8, incredible performance, etc. This is a book about a couple of guys who had the dream to go out and do it.

Mark Christensen is a writer who meets a designer, Nick Pugh, who is at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Nick has just made (ca 1990) auto design obsolete, and everyone at the school has become his clone or disciple. Mark convinces Nick to shy away from the big automakers and build the car, with the promise of $100,000 from a friend. The rest of the book goes on to describe two things:

1) The way Mark and his friends grew up in the car-crazy 50s and 60s with dreams of making super hot rods to impress the chicks.

2) The years long process of trying to build their perfect beast.

I'll say this about Mark's writing: I will do whatever I can to try and find the rest of his body of work. His sense of narrative and way of making events pop off the page is astonishing. I have not had this strong a desire to keep reading deep into the night since the last Nabokov novel I read. This man is a credit to writing and is to be admired for his wordcraft. His sentences evoke the images of a 40ish
guy reliving the triumphs, failures and regrets of "a generation that grew up under a tremendous lack of oppression". His hot rodder stories make you ache for the chance to make right the butchery that perfectly good iron suffered for the sake of "cool" on hot summer nights. The tales of the huge wheeling dealing finances, backed with barely being able to pay his rent bring all the dreams of automotive excess to shocking clarity. Its spine-tingling, laugh out loud, whack your forehead and groan all in one easy to carry hardback!

This novel has reinvigorated and frightened me all at the same time about my crazy schemes to make my own car. I believe it within the realm of possibility for me to turn my dreams someday into metal and fiberglass. I now know vividly just how hard a road it can be.

The characters in this very true story (the evolution of the design and pics of the final car, which is for sale, are available, wend their way through a wonderful array of characters from flimflam men, conspiracy theorists, alternative fuels, patent attorneys and the whole of SoCal speed shop and fabricator culture in their pursuit of the perfect machine. The cast of characters is numerous, the pace is hectic and the humor is everywhere, along with yearning, hope, fear and desperation.

This is simply the best bit of non fiction I have read in years.

Read it.

RangeR "Oh no! Now he's reviewing books too!" BoB