The SEMA Show held annually in Las Vegas is a hub for car enthusiasts to witness a plethora of eccentric builds showcasing the possibilities of using materials such as sheetmetal, carbon fiber, composites, fiberglass, and paint. Chris Steinbacher and his team at B Is For Build, who are known for their out-of-the-box builds that spark conversations, participated in this year’s SEMA Show. They brought with them a jaw-dropping creation that incorporated three controversial elements in car building: a classic 1967 fastback Mustang that has been converted into a mid-engine LS-swapped car.
The B Is For Build team showcased their eye-catching, one-of-a-kind creation at SEMA 2022 – a mid-engine LS-swapped ’67 Mustang with an impressive wide-body kit. However, they faced a major hurdle when they arrived at the Holley booth two days before the show – the car was incomplete and unable to run. Undeterred, the team worked tirelessly for several sleepless nights inside the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center to finish the Mustang. Finally, with just an hour left until the show started, they were able to complete the car and get it running in time.
Based on a rendering Chris saw online, his Mustang features a one-off wide-body kit created entirely by hand, one layer of fiberglass at a time.
From What-If To Reality
Chris admitted he had wanted to build a fastback Mustang for a long time. When the opportunity popped up to snag a mid-engine chassis for a reasonable price, he decided to take one last swing at building a classic Mustang the way he wanted. Having seen a rendering by artist Karan Adivi of what a ’69 Boss 302 Mustang could look like with a wider-than-wide body kit and the proper stance, Chris knew the direction he wanted to go with this build. So, he reached out to Adivi to get his blessing to bring the artist’s rendering to life in steel and fiberglass. With the enthusiastic support of Adivi, Chris got to it with a combination of 3D scanning, modeling, and old-fashioned pencil and paper to figure out how to fit a classic Mustang body to a mid-engine chassis.
B Is For Build based their Mustang on this rendering by Karan Adivi.
Turning A Pony Into A Thoroughbred
Taking an iconic car like a ’60s Mustang and building it with the exaggerated proportions of Adivi’s rendering will make waves among car enthusiasts. There are the purists that believe the body lines should be left alone, the custom car people that are all for making things unique while following unspoken aesthetic criteria, and the ones that think there are zero rules to car building. Chris and the B Is For Build crew fall into the latter group. Their creation is sure to garner positive and negative reactions from all who lay their eyes on it.
The humongous bulging fenders wrap around 12-inch wide American Racing wheels custom-made for this project.
Backing up a little, Chris sourced the rolling chassis for this project through a friend who had a line on several retired movie cars from the film Need For Speed. The chassis is one of approximately 14 built by Superlite Cars (SLC) specifically for the film to be replica supercars. This particular chassis appeared as a Bugatti in the movie. Although the car was a bit of a basket case by the time Chris purchased it, the foundation was there to start a new build. The SLC chassis is a thorough-bred race car chassis built for speed and handling. It features independent front and rear suspension with QA1 coilovers. Chris’ purchase also included an LS3 engine mated to a Porsche transaxle. To spice things up a bit, a Holley Hi-Ram intake fitted with a direct port nitrous system from NOS was added to the existing LS3.
The car sports QA1 coilovers in a cantilever setup in the rear. The direct port nitrous system may not get used much, but it definitely adds to the looks department of the engine bay.
With the SLC chassis sitting in the B Is For Build shop, the team set work getting their Mustang body to fit. Although the rendering of this car is based on a ’69 Boss Mustang, the car uses a ’67 Fastback Mustang as its starting point. As is expected with this type of project, the wheelbase of the body needed to be adjusted to match the chassis. Cutting the body in half and stretching the wheelbase 3 inches was surprisingly one of the more straightforward body modifications made on this project. According to Chris, they had to cut their Mustang body along its entire length several times to narrow and taper the car’s width a total of 8 inches to match up to the SLC chassis.
With its extremely wide fenders, it is hard to tell that the width of this Mustang has been narrowed approximately eight inches to fit its SLC chassis.
With the body nipped and tucked to fit its supercar chassis, the next stage of the build was to fabricate the framework and skeleton of the extra-wide body kit, followed by layers upon layers of fiberglass. Once the guys had the body’s general shape in solid form, many hours of meticulous hand sanding were required to achieve the curves and lines to match Adivi’s rendering. When building any wide-body vehicle, the wheels and tires can be a make-it-or-break-it piece of the puzzle. B Is For Build teamed up with American Racing to create a custom set of 12-inch wide wheels with staggered offsets to fill the bulging fenders just right. The approximately 10 inches of lip on the rear wheels is achieved with a 144 mm negative offset.
Aside from the obvious wide-body kit, the B Is For Build Mustang features many other one-off and custom parts.
Building a complete car from the chassis up is a huge undertaking. Building a car that requires cutting and sectioning to fit a chassis it was never meant for and then creating a one-off wide-body kit from scratch all in about 45 days to make a SEMA crunch deadline is mind-blowing. Chris and the B Is For Build crew pulled it off and have created a car that gets people talking. We look forward to seeing what B Is For Build will come up with next.
This wild mid-engine 1967 Mustang was built from scratch as it aims for a SEMA debut in the coming weeks.
Over the past few years, Chris Steinbacher of the YouTube channel B is for Build has forged quite the reputation for building some of the wildest machines out there, whether it be his controversial Eleanor recreation or a twin-turbocharged LS-powered Lamborghini off-road weapon of destruction. Now, as Steinbacher is attempting to once again one-up himself in his own world of crazy builds, and he’s putting together something truly special – a mid-engine 1967 Mustang – which he just treated to a pretty extreme wide body kit, as we can see in the video below.
What’s particularly cool about this mid-engine 1967 Mustang, however, is that it’s actually a former movie car, having served a role as a stunt vehicle in Need for Speed. In the movie, it was actually bodied as a Bugatti and was subsequently crashed into by a cop car. Since then, it’s being transformed into a ’67 Mustang with a design conjured up by an artist named Karana Divi, whose renderings are what inspired this particular project in the first place.
Obviously, building something like this from scratch is a rather complicated endeavor, and thus far, Steinbacher and his crew have put together a custom frame and body, with plenty of sheetmetal and fiberglass work taking place. This particular episode focuses on the wide body kit that will make it truly unique, however, and it’s every bit as over-the-top as we’d expect from Steinbacher’s Hot Wheels-like builds.
Regardless of one’s opinion on wide body cars, it is undeniable that the amount of skill and attention to detail that goes into creating this particular one is impressive. The team starts by shaping the fenders with wire, then fills them in with fiberglass using a labor-intensive handcrafted process. Although many people nowadays opt for pre-made kits, this project aims to distinguish itself from the rest and undoubtedly captures attention when it makes its debut at SEMA in a few weeks.
