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One dark night
Most Australian garages contain a Holden ute, a dead cow and at least 14 barbecues. This one contains a Tumbler...
The seat is a thin piece of foam; there's no sound deadening, and no trim either, and the front windscreen is about as big as a paperback novel. Also, it's so heavily tinted I feel like I'm going blind. The movie car had cameras to help Batman see out, and DIY Tumbler creator Grant Hodgson has a box of them to fit... next weekend. Oh.
Right in my ear, a big-block 454 Chevy V8 is yelling and screaming at me. We're still only at idle. Understandably nervous to let me loose on the road, the owners have allowed me to get a handle on this thing in a giant parking lot where there's nothing at all to hit. Or so we hope.
I've just climbed behind the wheel of the Tumbler, the building-jumping, wall-smashing Batmobile du jour from Batman Begins. Only this one hasn't been built by the design geeks in Hollywood; rather it's been spannered-up by a couple of blokes from Perth - and they built it from a picture.
Now, I'd like to say I dropped the clutch and smoked the sucker, but that would be a lie. Rather, sweating bullets, I took my foot gingerly off the clutch and inched forwards at a walking pace. And then I stalled it. And then again. Eventually, with the clutch almost burnt to a cinder, I got it right. And it was magic; think of it as the illegitimate child of an old-school supercar and a monster truck. There's stuff-all steering lock, so manoeuvring at low speeds is as frightening as sharing your lunch with a shark. The clutch is like a switch, and the throttle offers exactly nothing and then everything. It's angry, loud and utterly awesome.
But what prompts someone to build something they've only ever seen in a movie and that might just have been dreamt up by a geek in front of a computer? Hodgson explains: "Um, it was a total accident. We put a picture of the Tumbler onto our website to suggest we could build other types of movie-related cars. You know; no job too big, no job too small. We never thought, not in a million years, that anyone would ever ask us to build one of these things." But someone called their bluff.
For years, Hodgson, and his partner in movie-car-making, Gordon Hayes, have been making an almost-living from building replica Mad Max Interceptors. In fact, when it comes to the Interceptor, these boys are considered demi-gods.
"One of our clients, in Japan, had already had us build him a Mad Max Interceptor Series I and II for his collection, but when he saw the Tumbler on our site, well, he just had to have that too.
"We knew if we told him straight up we could do it, a deposit would have been wired immediately, so we held off replying for two weeks. Obviously there aren't any instructions on how to build one of these things.
"But in the end, we figured it was just a car. It didn't have to fly or do anything too out of the ordinary. So we didn't think it would be too much of a headache."
With a deposit burning a hole in their pockets, Grant and Hayes sat down with a picture of the Tumbler and a magnifying glass. They needed a starting point. Their eureka moment came when they spied the front tyres.
"If you've watched the movie, or seen any static pictures of the Tumbler, you'll clearly see that the front tyres are made by [speedway tyre maker] Hoosier. They only come in a 15-inch rim. Bingo.
"So, once we knew that measurement we could work out the scale of the picture." By building everything to scale based on those front wheels, work progressed at a rapid rate. But there was more to the project than just building something with the same front and rear tyres and the same body. Hodgson was adamant the car had to handle exactly the same as the one in the movie.
"We sat down and watched The Making of Batman Begins DVD, particularly the bit about the Tumbler, over and over and over again. And each time we watched it we'd concentrate on one small area; we'd measure and then cut, and then look at the pictures, and then re-cut again. It's been a never ending battle of trial and error."
It has taken four years of early mornings, late evenings and weekends, and almost $250,000 of someone else's money to get the car to the stage you see here. But now, a month or so before handover, the Tumbler is finally alive and kicking. It's missing some mesh in a few of the vents, the afterburner at the rear, and the machine guns in the nose, and it has only driven about five kilometres until today, but Hodgson says this is all just tidying up. To my non-geek eye the thing looks totally ready for action. Just look at the pictures and tell me it doesn't send a shiver down your spine.
"Fans in America who've seen the real movie car and taken measurements tell us we're within millimetres," Hodgson says. That's unbelievable.
Given the Tumbler of the movie is essentially nocturnal, we take it for a night cruise. In daylight it's hard enough to see out of, but now it's nearly impossible. There are a couple of little halogen lights at the front which give the Tumbler an eerie spider-esque look, but don't do much to illuminate things. Fortunately we have a police escort to keep an eye on us, making sure we don't veer off line and end up terrorising pedestrians. And once it's travelling at a decent pace, the Tumbler is remarkably nimble, while AP Racing callipers mean it can stop on a five-pence piece.
"That's the furthest I've driven this thing," Hodgson says, after we park up and clamber out. "All I could see were the tail-lights of the police car in front. But I absolutely loved every minute of it."
He's not the only one.
