How much knowledge and experience does it take to successfully build your own car?

A year…? Five years…? A lifetime…?

In some cases, the answer is none. All it takes is a cinema ticket.

When Charlie Ramsay came out of an early showing of Gone in 60 Seconds back in the year 2000, he had a thought in his head that wasn’t exactly unique among those who had watched the film:

“I want a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500.”

But, as plenty of gearheads will already know, there was a problem with this wish. The specific car that Charlie had fallen in love on the big screen with didn’t really exist. 

“Who’s Eleanor?”

Eleanor – as the car is known in the film – isn’t a GT500, but a 1967 Ford Mustang fastback with a customised body kit. The prohibitive price tag ($150,000+) of tracking down GT500s was one reason its producers chose to go this Frankenstein route instead.

Given that only three Eleanor’s of eleven or twelve that were built for the movie survived the filming process, it appears that this was a smart move.

“The thing about the ‘67 fastback is that it was mass-produced,” Charlie says. “So there are loads out there. If someone had an actual GT500, they’d never want to do this sort of thing [i.e. sell it to a production company or build a replica Eleanor] with it.”

In 2001 the first film in The Fast and the Furious franchise made its debut and many of Charlie’s peers forgot about Eleanor, looking east for their new dream motors instead. After all, cars like the Nissan Skyline and the Mitsubishi Eclipse were cheaper and easier to obtain than vintage muscle cars.

One of the original Eleanor Ford Mustangs from Gone in 60 Seconds sold at auction for more than $850,000 at the beginning of this year and, while a standard GT500 shell won’t cost you quite that much, the fastback remains a far cheaper and more achievable option.

Not long after the release of Fast & Furious 6 in 2013, which coincidentally heavily featured an ‘Eleanor’ 1967 Mustang fastback, Charlie would find that out first-hand.

From Mustang Fastback to Shelby GT500(ish)

In some ways, Charlie was lucky that his dream car is such a peculiar beast – tens of thousands more fastbacks were produced than GT500s – but it wasn’t until he was on a road trip with a friend in 2013 that a chance encounter let him secure one of his own:

“We found the car in some old barn. It was the whole thing, not just a shell, but none of the interior was usable. The engine was no good and it had a dead raccoon in it! The guy selling it told me that ‘there’s rust in all the obvious places’, and I’d later come to learn that really meant there was rust in all the worst places.”

But some dreams just refuse to die. Charlie bought the hunk of junk, paying almost as much in shipping and import duties to get it from the US to the UK as he did for the car itself. It was only when his new baby was up on blocks in a tiny garage in East London that a harsh realisation set in: He knew absolutely nothing about restoring a classic car.

“I was going to this place every day, learning everything I could on YouTube, and doing as much of it as I could myself. It’s the same feeling you get when you fix something in your crappy first car, just with a bigger and better toy. There’s no sense of satisfaction like it.”

“There were some scary days,” Charlie admits. “The electrics, the welding. I had to learn to do all that myself, but I got it checked by people who know what they’re talking about and they said it was all good. I just wanted to make sure the engine wouldn’t fall out!”

For the engine itself, Charlie enlisted the help of his engineer friend Abraham. 

“I couldn’t do the engine on my own. I didn’t think it was safe, so I brought Abes in for that. It was so big that we had to cut the shock towers out of the car to get the engine in it. My heart was pounding all day. Actually, there were a lot of days it was pounding like that...”

Seven years of hard work, countless YouTube tutorials, a move from the tiny London garage to his parents’ house in Kent and one very small fire (no big deal!) later, Charlie is now the proud owner of a car that could still set Nicholas Cage’s heart racing.

“What sets my car apart from the others is that mine might be the only one in the UK with a present-day engine in it,” he says. “It’s got a Ford Coyote, which gives it about 420BHP, front and rear suspension, all that. It’s a 1967, but it’s a modern car inside.”

“The easy way or the hard way”

Whether you’re tricking out a DMC DeLorean to look like a time machine with some style or debating whether to add a now questionable flag to the roof of an orange 1969 “General Lee” Dodge Charger, there’s always more to “movie cars” than just the movie.

After all, if you want a custom built Eleanor, you can pay Fusion Motor Company a quarter of a million dollars to make one for you. But that approach skips part of the story behind a movie car, whether it’s living out your childhood fantasy or the sense of satisfaction that comes with fanatical attention to detail. Charlie’s father would come to be a huge part of this car’s story:

“Two years ago, I spent the whole summer working on the car with my dad every day. Then, last year, he passed away. I look back and the money the whole thing cost me means nothing because it gave me that time with him, and that’s worth everything to me. I can never sell that car, since me and my dad worked on it...I’d never sell it anyway though, just look at it!”

The car runs perfectly but is a few tests and bits of red tape away from being road legal. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, that’s taken something of a backseat.

For a long time, Charlie’s biggest question has been “where will the first big drive be?” (South of France? Cruising the B-roads of England? Road tripping through Europe? Heading back stateside?) but a better question now might be “when will the first big drive be?”

We talked a bit with Charlie about the idea of building movie cars and whether or not he would do another one. He floats the idea of Mad Max’s 1974 XB Ford Falcon Coupe or Smokey and the Bandit’s 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am but says that, if you were to build a Mustang that’s currently relevant, the one to make would probably be John Wick’s 1969 Mustang Mach 1.

“Give me a really cool movie car though,” he says, “and I’ll make it.”

In some respects, now might be the perfect time to build a movie car. There are lots of people out there with an unprecedented amount of free time and a strong desire to find an escape from the “real world”. Plus, as Charlie calls out, the whole experience gave him a newfound respect for his tools and an unbeatable sense of accomplishment. He left us with this advice:

“Don’t be afraid if you haven’t got any experience because I didn’t have any experience. If you can follow instructions, you can do it. The way we get information now, we can watch how other people have done it on YouTube. Maybe you jump the gun a little bit, but you learn from problems that they did not have. I’m just really glad I did it, it was a wicked thing to do.”

Thanks for talking to us Charlie!