Chip Foose Hemisfear Hot Rod Coupe - The Hemisfear
Chip Foose is a household name. People who have never even picked up HOT ROD or any other car magazine know who he is, thanks to the television shows and guerrilla marketing of all things Foose. But back before he was the Chip Foose, he was a student at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, majoring in transportation design. Growing up with his father, Sam, one of the top hot rod builders in the business, Chip became proficient in the art of hot rod building and showed a particular talent for design work; Art Center gave him the tools to get where he is now.
While in school, Chip's graduation project was a Chrysler-sponsored niche-market design concept called the Hemisfear, an all-aluminum, two-seater, mid-engine car. Chip put 400 hours into building a 1/5-scale model out of fiberglass, billet aluminum, and wood (the tires) and painted it in a beautiful violet and pearl hue. Gray Baskerville featured it in Roddin' at Random in the April '91 issue of HOT ROD, and his last line said, "With results like this, we can only hope that somebody in Detroit has his eye on young Chip."
Based on the career he's had and is still enjoying, it's probably a good thing that Chip didn't end up at an OE, though a few years after the Hemisfear design came a production car looking strikingly similar to it-the Plymouth Prowler. The first versions of the car were even the same color as the scale model. Chip didn't get any credit for the car's design, but the rest of us know the truth. Chip had always wanted to build a real version of the Hemisfear and had actually started on it while he worked for Boyd Coddington in the mid-'90s. He had a chassis mostly done, and Chrysler got Dick Landy to build a snortin' Hemi for the project, but it stalled and got put on the back burner.
Fast-forward to 2005, and Chip is a superstar with all kinds of licensing deals. One of those deals was with RC2 Corp, a maker of toy cars, to produce die-cast versions of Chip's most famous hot rods. The subject of the Hemisfear came up, and out of that conversation came a deal to fund the buildup of a running, driving version of the car under the JL Full Throttle brand. Chip's longtime dream now had legs, and design work began on the Hemisfear.
Originally there was to be just one car, but that changed with the involvement of Metalcrafters. Run by the Gaffoglio family and Mike Alexander (of the famous Alex-ander Brothers), Metalcrafters is a West Coast-based fabrication shop (for lack of a better term-the place is amazing) that's used by almost every OE manufacturer and a ton of high-end aftermarket companies. Chip talked to Metalcrafters about digitizing his model and making a fullsize foam buck out of it, and by the time they were done Metalcrafters had agreed to build the car, as well as another 49 that it would sell to anyone who wanted one.
The cars will all be built at Metalcrafters and will be sold through both Metalcrafters and Unique Performance in Texas. The price is $298,000, and there are numerous options. The cars you see here are the first two. Actually, the green one is preproduction car 1, built with the funding from JL Full Throttle, and the black car is serial number 1, now owned by Don Voth of Canada. The green car will stay with Chip. It was also the "placeholder" at the Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach auction where the winning bidder paid $330,000 for serial number 2, which came with a personal consultation with Chip to get the car built just the way he wanted.
When you pay that kind of money you have a lot of options, one of which is in the engine. The Hemisfear is powered by a Chrysler Hemi (duh), but not the Landy Hemi that Foose originally had for the car. These are new Mopar Performance 392 Hemi crate motors. The other choice is a Ford 5.4L DOHC engine, an option brought about by some legal mumbo-jumbo with DaimlerChrysler, who got possessive over the Hemi name. It was still being worked out as we write this-hence the option of a Ford powerplant. A car with a Ford (or any other non-Hemi) will be called a Foose Coupe instead of a Hemisfear.
Chip designed the car, Hotchkis Performance designed and built the suspension, and the engines are from Mopar Performance, but nearly everything else was done in-house at Metalcrafters, including the curved glass. The entire car was designed on the computer first (as you can see with all the CAD drawings on the opening spread of this story), then fabricated and tweaked as necessary. From Chip's scale model, Metalcrafters digitized the shape and computer-milled a fullsize version out of foam, which was then used as the buck to form the carbon-fiber body shell. The chassis is a combination of square and round tubing, and the suspension is independent at both ends, with rocker arm-actuated coilovers mounted behind the grille shell in the front and double wishbones in the rear. John Hotchkis and his crew at Hotchkis Performance designed the suspension to be much more road racer than street rod, and in initial testing at Buttonwillow Raceway in California, the car looked as if it worked very well. We seriously doubt that anyone who buys one of these cars will ever drive it hard enough to make a difference, but it's nice to know that the car works.
The 392 Hemi engines in the two cars seen here are stock except for the Hilborn stacks converted to EFI on the green car (the black car used a stock EFI intake), and each is mated to a ZF five-speed transaxle similar to what was used in a Pantera. The engine sits right behind the occupants' heads-neither of these cars currently has a separator panel between human and engine, but they will, as will all the others. The interior is small but very comfortable, and the materials are top-grade. Metalcrafters even fabricated the seats, which are some of the nicest chairs we've ever had the pleasure to fondle.
Since it's a scratch-built car, you may be wondering how it can be registered. It's actually sold as a component car and comes without the engine installed. That way it's not a turnkey runner, allowing buyers to register the Foose Coupes just as they would a kit car.
The Hemisfear/Foose Coupe is certainly not for everyone. It's a very expensive street rod, and the price tag would make driving it a pretty nerve-racking affair. But the car works and should be blindingly fast. If you've got 300 large burning a hole in your pocket and want the exclusivity of a one-of-50 Chip Foose signature car, get in line now. Plus, as investments go this might not be a bad one.

Photo Gallery: Chip Foose Hemisfear Hot Rod Coupe - Hot Rod Magazine



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