The Tribute

With a rare TCP magic wide body conversion and lashings of carbon-fibre, jonny grunwald’s radical RX-7 has been built to honour the top tuner cars of Japan.

- Dansherwood

Social media has a lot to answer for. When it’s not causing the divorce rate to skyrocket when discontented spouses get overly-friendly with an old flame on Messenger, the anonymity gives spineless keyboard warriors the confidence to indulge in a spot of cyber bullying. Then there’s the pressure that it puts on people. Pressure to be cool, popular or even just included. People are not judged on what they’re like in reality, but by how many ‘Likes’ their posts get, or how many ‘Followers’ they have on their Instagram account. The same thing happens with the car scene. These days, no-one bats an eyelash if a car is a pig to drive or is even mechanically sound, as long as it features air ride, bolt-on arches and rims so ludicrously wide and stanced that even running over a rogue paperclip would see them smash into the bodywork. The speed at which these images disperse all over the globe is an instant indication of people’s approval. And then everyone else seems to follow suit, trying their best to out-do the ones that came before with ever lower ride heights and everwider rolling stock, all eager for their own five-minutes of Insta-celebrity. And the cycle continues. But then that’s the thing about trends, isn’t it. When they start, they spread like wild fire, with everyone jumping on the bandwagon. The presence of social media has simply sped up the process. However, that’s not to say that builds that don’t conform to the current trend that’s ‘breaking the internet’ this week are in any way inferior, far from it, as US-based rotary fan Jonny Grunwald’s incredible Mazda RX-7 proves.

‘I’ve always liked to do things differently,’ says the Long Beach-based entrepreneur.