These Handmade Driving Machines Are Like Nothing Else on the Road

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A barn in Minnesota is the kind of place where a ­classic car collector might find a vintage vehicle that, with a little help from a reproduction specialist, could end up being worth something in a few years.

But Christopher Rünge doesn’t deal in classics. In his barn, on a family farm outside Minneapolis, he builds his cars by hand, one at a time, by himself, without a blueprint. Aside from the occasional help from his teenage son, the man works alone. He estimates it takes 2,000 hours to get one built.

Every Rünge vehicle is sheathed in aluminum polished so deeply its surface reflects like a surgeon’s tray. The FF004 model has curves that undulate down the length of the car, whereas the compact FF007 Gullwing is a chrome cannon­ball on wheels. The 40-year-old Rünge is inspired by the 1950s-era cars built and raced by the greats—Ferrari, Jaguar, Maserati, Porsche—except that each one of his creations is unique. Prices start at $225,000.

He came to his current obsession in a roundabout way, though the benefit of hindsight hints at a common thread. As a teenager he worked with a local missionary ­optometrist repairing medical equipment to send overseas. In the early 2000s he was designing gear for Burton Snowboards.

In 2010 he visited an elderly woman in South Dakota who’d posted a ’67 Porsche 912 for sale on Craigslist. “She lived on a 3,000-acre farm with her husband, who had recently passed, and was selling the car,” Rünge says. “I hooked up a trailer, drove five hours, and when I got there, there were entire barns filled with old parts and tools—an English wheel, aluminum bodies, homemade contraptions. Aisles of them.”

He bought the entire lot, with one provision: He promised he’d use the tools himself, not resell them. The first thing he used them for was to craft a car seat from a single sheet of aluminum, which quickly led him to try his hand at a fender. The next step was building a whole vehicle. (He uses engines from other cars, including a Porsche 356.) It took a year to finish.

Rünge dubbed it the FF001. In 2012 a man at a local cars and coffee gathering saw it and asked for one of his own. “I had absolutely no intention of selling it,” Rünge says. So he made him the FF002.

His most recent creation is the RS010, which features a full steel tube frame and a 2.3-liter, 200-horsepower flat-four mid-engine mated to a four-speed “longbox” transmission, which puts cruising speeds in fourth gear comfortably at 80-plus mph. Interior controls and toggle switches are taken from 1950s aircraft, and a clock from a Soviet MiG jet is in the dash. The cockpit is even insulated and sound-deadened, with 12-volt electric air conditioning, making the drive very comfortable. The RS010 weighs about 1,600 pounds overall, about half the weight of an average midsize sedan.

Rünge has made 10 cars so far, and three more are almost completed, including an R2 that will be out within weeks. To get one of your own, the wait time is three years.

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