Long ago when I was a little boy, circa 1989, my favorite color was orange. I fondly remember the day when my parents picked me up from daycare with a skateboard in hand. But this was no regular skateboard, no this was a spankin' new Nash board. If you grew up in the late 80s or early 90s you undoubtedly remember how crappy Nash was. But at the ripe age of 4, all I cared about was the way the black dragon graphic on the bottom cut sharply through the bright orange paint. When I first saw Ralph Bossino's car I instantly had flashbacks of my long lost deck.
There's something else about the way the orange paint enters my eye and is sent down my optic nerve to my brain that the inner child still loves. Orange and black just seem to compliment each other perfectly. That actually reminds me that I still need to find a pair of Nike SB Flash Dunks in a size 8. Anyway the sellf-proclaimed "incredibly picky" Bossino "refused to accept the car as a finished product until it was perfect." For most of us that means the paint needs to be shiny and new. Ralph's idea of perfect is in an entirely different realm, which you will begin to realize more as the BosStylist saga continues. For this car "perfect" required a full color change paint job, four times at two locations. While I can't afford to paint my car even once, it's humbling to see people that are willing to go to those lengths before satisfied.
At its second and final paint stop at South Florida Collision the car took two tries before Bossino finally approved the car's new pumpkin coat. After the S2K was color-sanded and prepped to leave Ralph knew it needed more before he could call it his own. The tribal graphics on this car are very aggressive, so much so that Charles is actually scared shitless of them. Now every time he steps into my office to take something I have a tool to forcibly remove him from the area, thanks Ralph! But we get the feeling this is probably the approach Bossino was going for. He's going to need all the help he can get to have his fellow Gibraltanese move out of the way when he's making highspeed passes over it's entire three square miles.
Okay so I think I may have made up a word there, but Gibraltar is in fact an actual place. No I'm not kidding, you can look it up. I was briefly aware that such a place existed, but only because at my former job there was a conference room named after the place. I was unsure if it was a city or a country or what the hell it was. Nobody even knew how to pronounce Gibraltar. I just mumbled and said "Guurrhhbrahltahhh" in a similar manner as the "dirka dirka" phrase from South Park. After doing some brief research I have come to the following conclusions: It's a peninsula that borders Spain to its north, it has a population of just over 25,000 people and it looks like a giant bolder covered in trees. Gibraltar "is incredibly small, we have more kilometers of tunnels inside the rock than roads outside!" says Bossino. "This car is way too wild for Gibraltar. The maximum speed limit here is 50kmh [and] we only have single lane roads."
I will apologize now for those of you reading this article to escape a world studies course, but when you realize this man's background the build is even more astonishing, 50kmh is about 31mph, imagine owning a 414hp S2000 and being constantly restricted to residential areas. Myself and the rest of the Super Street staff were somewhat puzzled as to why or how a person from such a place would even consider building a car of this magnitude. "When I was 14 I went into a magazine shop to buy a car magazine and came across a 'Maxi Tuning' (Spanish tuning mag). There was a modified Supra on the cover and after flicking through the magazine I bought it. I read it cover-to-cover three times, and was absolutely taken aback by what people were doing with their cars." Ralph explains. "Tuning has been a part of me since I picked up that first magazine. Every car I see, the first thing I think is how can I improve that car?"