Meet The Canadian Who Is Building Race-Car Replica Ferraris From His Garage

Many of us would love to know how it feels to drive a vintage Ferrari race car. Many more of us would love to possess the skills needed to build our own. We should all take inspiration from Brandon Hegedus, a self-taught Canadian builder who’s just completed his third carbon-fiber-bodied Ferrari race-car replica.

Car number three, his first commission for a client, is billed as a 1967 Ferrari 412 P Tribute. It’s every bit as arresting as the original. Replica it may be, but this is not a 1980s Pontiac Fiero Testarossa. It has since traveled to its owner in the US, where the addition of wiring, a fuel system and upholstery completed the beautiful sports-racer.

When Hemmings visited Hegedus in October, it sat in the garage-workshop alongside his own 1966 Dino 206 S build. The Nissan-powered 206 was his second Ferrari replica build, following an astonishing 1962 156 “Sharknose” F1 car that was subsequently sold to a US businessman in 2023.

Do It Yourself

As with his previous cars, what’s remarkable about the 412 P Tribute is that Hegedus has done everything himself. The list includes modifying and welding the tube-frame chassis, fabricating suspension, correcting the body shape, creating fiberglass molds for the bodywork, laying up the carbon-fiber cloth for the panels themselves, fabricating shifters and other aluminum components, heat-forming the acrylic windows, and painting and detailing the finished bodywork – all in a two-car garage in the town of Airdrie, just north of Calgary, Alberta.

But Hegedus is no overnight success. He has been teaching himself the skills needed to create beautiful objects in 3D since he was eight years old.

“My dad was a bricklayer and at year-end would ask my brother and I which tool we wanted for our one-car garage–workshop,” he remembers. “One year we’d buy a table saw, the next year a band saw, or a welder. He would bring these tools home and tell my brother and I, ‘When you’ve figured out how to use it, teach me. Don’t lose your fingers.’ And surprisingly, neither of us ever did.”

Further stepping stones on the journey to acquire knowledge were a garage-sale go-kart that always needed fixing, a turbocharged ’89 Dodge Caravan and three rat-rod builds: a diesel-powered 1927 Ford that was sold to fund the 156, a 1926 sedan and a 1929 Speedster. He worked evenings and weekends on them, learning more new skills: steering and suspension geometry, frame design, complex welding and more.

A New Challenge

Hegedus went in search of a new challenge after finishing his third rat rod. He picked the “Sharknose” for its beauty, for its simple lines, for its enclosed engine (there was no chance of sourcing an original powerplant) and for the ease with which he could find accurate wheels and tires.

To get a handle on how to create fiberglass molds for body panels, Hegedus visited the shop of a friend who made giant sculptures for Disney and Hollywood.

“He showed me how they carved foam into a positive of what they wanted, then coated it with a drywall mud or compound that they could sand and get fine detail. Then they would hard-coat it and make the mold from it. He showed me where they put the flanges so that nothing locks into the mold. And it all clicked in my head. I went and bought a giant brick of foam and started carving it into shape.”

But while many of the skills involved in builds as ambitious as the Ferrari replicas can be learned, Hegedus agrees that not everyone can visualize the goal in the way that he is able.

“I think the God-given talent that you can’t train is the fact that when I look at a picture of something, my brain will automatically break it down into a schematic of how to recreate it in real life,” he shares. “I can see the beginning from the end. I don’t use AutoCAD, and I don’t really draw anything out. I just build it. That part is very hard to describe. I suppose it’s no different than how a composer makes music – they just see it. That blows my mind.”

Four-and-a-half years in the making, the “Sharknose” became a social media hit on Hegedus’s Instagram account, @howisthatstreetlegal. True to that moniker, the Hayabusa-powered single-seater donned temporary plates for some epic photo shoots on the streets of Calgary.

Emboldened by his hard-won skills in carbon-fiber bodywork, he opted for the more complex curves of the 1966 Dino 206 SP as his next endeavor, documenting the 19-month process on YouTube under the same How Is That Street Legal channel. With his meticulous work now attracting the attention of international clients, a collection of 412 P and 330P4 parts entered the Airdrie garage in October 2023.

Going Pro

The 412 P’s owner initially approached Hegedus to build a carbon-fiber body. The owner had been collecting parts for more than a decade – including a priceless set of original Campagnolo wheels from a 412 P. He had acquired some body panels, and a partial chassis made in the UK, as well as obtaining a 5.5-liter Ferrari V-12 sourced from a 456 and a ZF-Quaife transaxle.

“There were fiberglass bodywork pieces from different cars made in different places,” Hegedus explains. “But because the originals were handmade aluminum, the shapes would be subtly different from car to car. A panel from one car won’t fit another, and these didn’t marry together either.

“The original plan was just to build the body in carbon using his fiberglass bodywork as the buck to make the molds from. But it’s my belief that it’s far better to have the body and chassis built in the same place, so they fit together perfectly. I agreed to take the project on.”

Giving up his job as a cabinetmaker to build cars full-time was a major step for the hitherto hobby builder, but a deal was done whereby inside 12 months, his newly named Hegedüs Automobili business would deliver a complete rolling chassis with engine and gearbox mounted, with the shifter built and mounted, all-carbon bodywork made including the interior tub, and the car fully painted.

Building The 412 P Tribute

Hegedus began with the chassis, working outward from the center on a frame table. Unlike with the previous cars, he didn’t have to start from scratch this time.

“About half the chassis work on this car had been finished in England,” he says. “I took that partial chassis and cut a bunch out of it, modified a bunch more, and then finished it. I added more structure for safety, which is what I’ve done for all these cars, making sure no tubes are pointing at the driver in any given crash situation.”

Hegedus’s knowledge of vehicle suspension is also self-taught, “watching engineers on YouTube talk about why control arms behave as they do, and how geometry will affect how a car behaves through a corner. I love that math. With suspension and steering, everything is give-and-take. A perfect setup doesn’t exist; if it did, where would be the fun in that? The challenge is what makes it exciting.”

He says the 412 P’s suspension is set up for good traction through the range of travel, accounting for the car’s wheelbase, width, control-arm lengths and other physical factors. Given that it will likely be used more for shows and on the street, rather than as a pure track machine, “it still needs to be comfortable enough. It won’t shake your teeth out like a real race car would”.

Meanwhile the body’s complex curves were his most demanding carbon project to date. He re-shaped the 412 P’s bulbous fenders by eye, with laser-line checks helping to bring symmetry across the car. “It’s close enough that your eye would never pick it out, similar to the original cars,” he adds. Having examined the car in person, it’s clear that Hegedus has an incredible eye.

The raw material is 200-gsm, 3k 2×2 twill carbon cloth. He’s educated himself on the science of the material as well as on the associated epoxies, landing on a matrix that will molecularly bond to the carbon, give a five-hour working time and cure to its full hardness at room temperature. Working through the summer, when heat can dramatically shorten the cure time, is a bigger challenge than plowing through a subzero Alberta winter in a heated garage.

Focus on Detail

Even more challenging than the shell were unsung details like the door hinges and period-correct front headlight buckets. The latter cost Hegedus 10 precious days of his 50-week build time.

“The door mechanism looks very simple, but it’s hard to get the angles right,” he says. “The hinge must be at the proper angle to clear the bodywork when the door opens. The doors on almost all replicas open at 45 deg because it’s easier than achieving the correct 20-30 deg. After you’ve spent a couple of days of fighting with it, you must then achieve the exact same geometry in reverse to make the other side match when both doors are open.

“There’s no trick to it and no way to mock them up,” he continues. “You just fully weld it and mount the door. If it doesn’t work, you cut it off and weld again. The artisans who did work like this in Italy back in the day did it instinctively, just like their dad, their grandpa, and their great grandpa had done. I’m sure they didn’t always know how they did it because they’d started as an apprentice in a workshop when they were nine years old. It came naturally.”

Finishing Touch

The original plan was for Hegedus to deliver the 412 P primed, but not painted. However, a successful experiment with painting and weathering a spare set of doors led to a joint decision with the owner to paint and patina the entire car.

“I used a lot of the same techniques that you would on aging a model or a diorama, like an airbrush, blowers and sandblaster to weather the car to the way it would have looked post-race,” he explains. “I’ve never seen it done on a car like this because by the time you get it to the really shiny stage, how can you ever bring yourself to do that? But the thought was, if you saw two of these parked on the lawn at Pebble Beach, one perfectly shiny and restored, and one looking rough, like it had gone through a race, you’re obviously going to walk up to the dirty one first and stare in wonder at the life it has lived. So that’s what we decided to do.”

In person, the final effect is very convincing, and the contrast to the immaculate 206s/sp is obvious. We love them both.

Once the 412 P Tribute has departed, its space will be taken by another customer’s completion-from-parts project, an as-yet undisclosed Lancia rally-car replica. There are talks underway for further builds, too, so it looks like Hegedus’s new job is here to stay.

“The rally car was planned as a scratch build. But similarly to the 412 P, I found a stalled project. Many parts are there but it still needs a huge amount of fabrication and assembly.”

And as on every other car, he’s looking forward to learning some new skills during the process.

“It’s hard to say what those will be,” he assesses. “Each car has some element of realizing you’re in way over your head, and you just have to figure it out. But I like that part. And if I knew what those challenges were, maybe they would scare me off from doing the car, so I’m thankful that I don’t know what I don’t know.

“The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, yet they built an airplane, something nobody had ever done before, out of cotton and sticks in their backyard. They just figured it out. So why can’t you or I?”

Follow Hegedüs Automobili on Instagram or YouTube

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