The beauty of car customisation is that there are practically no limits to what you are able to achieve with the right car, the right vision and the right mindset, which creates an exceptionally broad scope to make your car as perfect as you want it to be.
On one end of the spectrum, there are intense detailing, paints, wraps and body mods that can help turn a capable stock or showroom car into an extremely striking and imposing figure, one that turns heads as it travels down the road.
On the other side, there are cars that are intended to be the best that they could possibly be, whether they are designed for concours competitions with showroom-level perfection, or restomods that use modern technologies to make older cars better than new.
As well as this, there is the rather more mysterious legacy of the Q-car, which courts fascination and controversy in equal measure by being far more than meets the eye.
What Is A Q-Car?
During the First World War, in an attempt to thwart the undersea menace of the dreaded U-boat submarines, the British unveiled a fleet of mysterious, deceptive and heavily armed merchant boats.
Known as Q-ships, they looked utterly harmless at first glance, and easy pickings for a U-boat that surfaced to not waste its underwater torpedoes.
However, as soon as it did, the naval flag would lift, hidden weapons mounted in lifeboats would open fire and the U-boat would hopefully be sunk.
Whilst this ultimately proved to be a tactical dead-end, the legend of the Q-ship has endured as some of the most fascinating and innovative warships ever made, and their legacy has lived on in the motoring world.
Also known as a sleeper car in the United States, the Q-car is an unassuming car barely any different from a standard hatchback or saloon, that has an astonishing level of performance that you would not expect in the slightest.
The first Q-cars have a rather surprising origin in the Soviet Union. The GAZ-M1, a 1930s USSR adaptation of the Ford Model A intended for use by the KGB, had a rather notable engine swap with a 65 hp Ford V8 engine.
The Q-car name itself was a reference to unmarked police cars, but by the 1960s would come to define modified sports saloons such as the Lotus Cortina.
Whilst most Q-cars were modified by owners to swap engines, add turbochargers or improve the exhaust system, making subtle modifications to further improve performance, there were some remarkable exceptions created by manufacturers or official tuning shops.
Starting with the Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3 in 1968, the Silver Arrows have regularly created performance versions of many of their saloons, more recently the AMG Black and Brabus models.
An even stranger case was the Lancia Thema 8.32. Built using a modified version of the engine from the Ferrari 308, the Thema was one of the fastest sports saloons of the 1980s, but unlike the Ford Sierra Cosworth, Saab 9000 or the first BMW M535i, it did not look as fast as it turned out to be.
However, when it comes to historically fast Q-cars and the beginning of the concept getting serious attention outside of the Cannonball Run and the Mid Night Club, one exceptionally fast and controversial example comes to mind.
Carlton And Omega
The Vauxhall Carlton was a large executive car that was rather unassuming in both looks and performance, typically seen as a bit of an also-ran during an era that had cars such as a Saab 9000 and the Ford Sierra Cosworth.
General Motors, Vauxhall’s parent company at the time, wanted to change this, and after buying Lotus in 1986, they gave them the green light to give it an upgrade to try and boost Vauxhall’s ailing reputation.
What they did instead was create one of the most famous sleeping dragons in the history of British motoring.
The Vauxhall Lotus Carlton looked largely the same as the standard car, but under the unassuming exterior was a 3.6l straight-six engine with turbochargers, the gearbox from a Chevrolet Corvette, a rear spoiler, wider wheel arches, cooling vents and other changes to turn a middling saloon into a beast.
The result was 377 hp, the ability to reach 55 mph in first gear and a top speed of 176 mph. This made it the fastest four-door production saloon car for over a decade and it remains one of the fastest Q-cars of all time.
This led to several attempts to get it banned, criticism by police, politicians and Autocar magazine, and a belief that it would lead to the introduction of electronic limiters similar to those used in Germany and Japan, but ultimately the 1990s recession meant that less than 1000 were made regardless.
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