It started with one simple decision: Fifty-two-year-old Kevin Nicks from the Chipping Norton area in Oxfordshire, England, chose not to scrap his Volkswagen Passat. Instead, he turned it into a fully functioning, street-legal shed on wheels. Screw #vanlife. The world has evolved. Or regressed; we’re not sure.
Nicks took the junker and built a shed around it, investing seven months and about $6500. The shed uses complete steel framing, which is responsible for much of the heft of the 4500-pound creation. Under the hood front door is the Passat’s powertrain, a 2.8-liter V-6 that Nicks says makes about 200 horsepower. But this isn’t just your average, everyday shed car; this shed car is used to set shed-car top-speed records. So in the spirit of What Would Brian O’Conner Do? Nicks added a wet nitrous-oxide injection kit for an extra boost.
“They say it’s mad,” Nicks told Barcroft. “They say it’s brilliant. A lot of people say, ‘Why?’ But the good thing for me, it just makes so many people smile.”
It makes Nicks smile, too, and that’s a possibly the best explanation. During a recent road trip from Land’s End to John O’Groats (the full north-to-south length of Great Britain), intended to raise money and awareness for the hospice that took care of his now deceased mother, he stopped at the Wheelie and Top Speed Championships in North Yorkshire, England. He showed up with one main goal: to best his previous top-speed record by going 100 mph. He fell short of triple digits but managed 96.831 mph, almost 9 mph better than his previous shed-on-wheels record of 88.068 mph.
For now, Nicks doesn’t have any defined future plans for the shed, but if we had to wager, we’d guess he’ll be back again next year with another attempt. Once the racing bug bites, the itch doesn’t go away. In the quest to build a 100-mph building, it might be time to add something to this unconventional monster that has become much more conventional: a turbocharger.
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