Hugely decorated four-time NBA champion Shaquille O’Neal likes sports cars. Hugely decorated four-time NBA champion Shaquille O’Neal is also 7’1 tall. These two things, as it turns out, pose problems for one another.
Not the kind of problems that can’t be solved with some angle grinders and welding torches, though, as it turns out. O’Neal wanted to get his hands on a new Chevrolet Corvette Z06, but even a relatively large mid-engined sports car like that has a cabin too snug to accommodate all 216cm of Shaq.
However, Effortless Motors, a custom car shop and dealership in Riverside, California, came to the rescue by hacking up a new Z06 in order to give it an extra 20 inches, or 50cm, of length, allowing O’Neal to just about fold himself into it.
The result is fairly bizarre looking, and we’re not sure what an extra 50cm of wheelbase will do to the Z06’s much lauded handling. Certainly, we don’t think this one would have much chance of matching the standard car’s 7:11.826 Nürburgring lap. Then again, it doesn’t seem too fair to deny O’Neal the chance to enjoy the fruits of his enormously successful career in the shape of the Z06’s 5.5-litre, 670bhp flat-plane crank V8 – the most powerful naturally aspirated eight-cylinder ever fitted to a production car.
Long-time car internet dwellers will know this isn’t the first mid-engined performance car O’Neal has had stretched to accommodate him. In the noughties, he owned an equally comical-looking embiggened Lamborghini Gallardo (the car in that one ‘Understandable, have a great day’ meme) – actually two separate Gallardos welded together with a lengthened mid section.
In a 2023 interview, he mentioned that he stopped driving that car and vowed not to buy any more sports cars after a close call in wet conditions, and that while the Z06 was his new favourite car, he’d never fit in one. Seems like he’s had a change of heart on both of those subjects.
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