To see what the future once might have looked like, you must first find R & W Motorsport.
Tucked inside a pocket of low-slopping bungalows near Uptown Mall, the repair shop hides in plain sight on the backside of a terraced commercial building along Cadillac Avenue.
Walk across the unpaved yard past German-made luxury cars, step through a high door, and suddenly it appears before you: a DeLorean DMC 12.
Less than 9,000 ever rolled off the production lines, but its place in the pantheon of popular culture remains forever secure after its starring role as the driving, flying time machine in the Back to the Future movie franchise featuring Canadian-born actor Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly.
It is, of course, not the vehicle that sparked imaginations across movie screens around the world during the 1980s. But as you might guess, Sam Woldegabriel, the W in R & W Motorsport, has to answer a lot of wise-guy questions about the role of the vehicle in one of the iconic pieces of pop culture.
“A lot of people know it from the movie,” he said. “They are like ‘Oh, you guys are waiting for a flux capacitor?’”
In case you might not know, the flux capacitor is the (fictional) plutonium-powered device invented by Dr. Emmett Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd) that allows Marty to travel back and forward in time, and Woldegabriel is game for playing along.
“We say, ‘Yeah, we are waiting for the capacitor’ and he — Woldegabriel points to his business partner Joe Rowland working in the adjacent bay — is the professor.”
So is Woldegabriel Marty then?
He chuckles with a sheepish look.
Still, the DeLorean is more than just a reference point for pop culture fiends of a certain age and a cool looking vehicle, which Woldegabriel and Rowland will display prominently once they move to their larger digs in a few months time to drive traffic.
It also projects possibility, the idea that it is possible to escape the ordinary and defy conventions.
Low, wide and angular, the vehicle bears the name of its designer, the late John Z. DeLorean, a flamboyant American industrialist and automobile executive, who shot to wider stardom in the 1960s and 1970s by revolting against a recalcitrant industry rooted in tradition.
“He was an anomaly in an industry then dominated by buttoned-down executives,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary of DeLorean, who died in 2005 at the age of 80. “He dyed his hair jet black, wore shirts open to the navel, married a teenage starlet and subsequently a supermodel, and became a wonder at self-promotion.”
This spirit defined the company and car that bore his name. “If we were super, super lucky and did everything right, we might someday have another BWM,” said DeLorean in 1977 when he discussed his plans for a vehicle with which he sought to break into the lucrative market for sports car dominated by vehicles deemed to be dull.
The DeLorean is anything but. Made out of stainless steel (“You can have any colour you want as long as its stainless,” DeLorean quipped at the time), powered by a V6 engine and featuring other elements then deemed modern. Its gull-winged doors give the DeLorean an appearance that could also be read as an upward flipping affront to then prevailing designs. In fact, DeLorean was so sure of his creation that he convinced the British government to sink $120 million into his $200 million plant that opened in 1981 in Northern Ireland.
With a sticker price of $25,000, a DeLorean cost more than twice than the average vehicle priced at $10,000. This fact alone limited the potential pool of customers. Quality problems also plagued production and the British government pulled the plug on the company less than two years after it had opened production.
DeLorean also found himself in legal hot water, facing charges of selling cocaine to support his business and defrauding investors. (He was acquitted of both). As legal troubles mounted, he was eventually forced to sell off his luxury estate, which ended up in the possession of then real-estate mogul Donald J. Trump. DeLorean, divorced thrice, eventually died of a stroke.
Yet for all of this drama, DeLorean’s engineering legacy remains undisputed.
Woldegabriel, who is restoring the DeLorean for an out-of-town client, says he enjoys working on it because of its uniqueness.
“You just feel really happy,” he said.
In fact, this feeling might soon spread.
A company calling itself the DeLorean Motor Co. announced earlier this year that it plans to build a limited number of replicas of the famed DMC 12. In that sense, it has truly become the car from Back to the Future.