SPITING IMAGE

IMMACULATELY FINISHED BY IMAGE VEHICLE MANUFACTURING, THIS BLOWN, 950HP '39 FORD PICK-UP WAS BUILT TO SHRED

- JAIN KELLY

YOU'VE gotta love a high-end street machine that's built to be driven hard - stone guard on its undercarriage instead of two-pack; chrome doodads and polished doohickeys replaced by quality engineering to handle bulk power. There are many such vehicles being built in suburban sheds and garages as we speak, but to end up with a rowdy, road-going, tar-burning example as nice as Richie Vergara's '39 Ford pick-up, you'd need to enlist a top custom car-building shop like Image Vehicle Manufacturing.

The wizards at Image have turned Richie's Ford into something the Sydneysider can jump in and have a ball with, yet it's also stunning, powerful, and impeccably finished. After all, when you have a shed full of go-fast metal like a twin-turbo V10 Lamborghini, as Richie does, your shenanigans sled needs to be hotter than a stolen pitchfork on a summer's day in Hades.

"I wanted a hot rod ute type of thing, something a bit different," says Richie, who at this point is one of Image's regular clients. "We definitely went off-track with it, because it was going to just get tidied up and with a normal, classic interior. But then we did the rollcage, then the outside..." Bought out of Orange, NSW, the truck had already been subjected to the overenthusiastic use of a grinder and bug-zapper.