Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Wins Immortality as Hot Wheels Legends Car

• A Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was totally reimagined into something far cooler, and the judges of the Hot Wheels Legends Tour were convinced it was the winner.
• Builder Riley Stair worked on it for almost two years.
• Now that the 1970 Firebird is the third Legends Car winner, it will be built in 1:64 scale and sold worldwide.

Riley Stair spent 20 months in a lean-to in his parents’ side yard building what is now generally acknowledged as the greatest Pontiac Firebird ever made. And now Hot Wheels and the judges of the Hot Wheels Legends Tour have agreed with that general assessment, naming it the third car to gain status as a 1:64-scale Hot Wheels Legends car, meaning it will be manufactured into a little toy car and sold around the world. Your own kid might be playing with it on your kitchen floor come 2021.

"Yeah, so, it's a bit wider than stock," Stair told Hoonigan last year. "It's a single layer of Pontiac, the rest is all tube chassis."

Indeed, the car is seven feet wide, a stat that seems to have fascinated almost everyone who has seen it and fully everyone who has written about it in the two years since its debut. The flares are 18-gauge steel sheet he made himself. It has inboard pushrod suspension. The 400-cubic-inch LSV8 revs to 10,000 rpm. The exhaust oozes forward of the engine block like Play-Doh extruded from a Play-Doh press.

"Everything but the paint and powder was done in the side yard of the house," Stair said.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Clearly, Stair is an artist. Let's hope he is still working on cars. If there’s ever another SEMA show, let's hope he is there with his next build.