This Guy Turned A Vietnam Era Helicopter Into An Amphibious Car

And raced it 24 Hours of Lemons. Later, it went up in flames.

You have to be pretty hardcore committed to build something like this, especially when it involves 3,000 man hours. What was once a Vietnam era attack helicopter became, for a short time, an amphibious car that also “raced” at the 24 Hours of Lemons. Meet Jeff Block, aka Speedycop. He’s known for some pretty wild creations that have also taken part at the 24 Hours of Lemons, but this Helicopter is particularly interesting. Over the course of six months, Block and his team built the so-called “Speedycopter.”

And yes, it can drive on both dry land and water. Really, and it’s street legal. Or, rather it was. What happened? On its way to an event, its driver smelled some smoke and pulled over to the side of the highway. He saw a small flame and immediately grabbed the fire extinguisher. He pulled the pin and nothing happened.

All he could do was stand there and watch as fire engulfed the once sky only helicopter. Because the helicopter contained a lot of magnesium, which was common in US military hardware, the fire destroyed the $10,000 oddity in a matter of minutes. No one was hurt, but it was painful, nonetheless, to see something so unique that required so much hard work go up in flames. Fortunately, there’s even weirder car creations to be done.

Aston Martin's Former Chairman Wants To Build Amphibious Cars

If anyone can make it work, it's the racing engineers at Prodrive.

Amphibious vehicles can be rather finicky. But one man is gearing up to wade into the market. And he just might have the chops to make it work. That man is David Richards, the head of British racing consultancy Prodrive and former chairman of Aston Martin. (He also basically runs Aston's racing division and once ran Honda's F1 team.) Richards recently traveled to California and came back with a Watercar Panther, a sort of Jeep modified for use across the earth's surface... and not just the dry parts. Richards has been modifying his, in part to meet European regulations.

In the process, he became interested in developing his own. So he put some of Prodrive's young engineers on it. “I went to see one in Los Angeles and was pleasantly surprised with the quality, so I bought one with the intention of importing some into Europe. But there’s lots of legislation, and it’s tricky for the EU with emissions and crash testing. Even single type approval had some insurmountable problems,” Richards told Autocar. “Now I’m inclined to do our own. We know about them, and I have some young engineers working on it – we’re all excited by it. I have a boat engineer looking at the hull.”

The idea would be to bring an amphibious off-roader to market with a turbodiesel engine for around ￡150,000 – equivalent to roughly $200,000, or about the price of a new Aston DB11. But Richards has no illusions about the task. Amphibious vehicles are typically “neither a great car nor a great boat,” he said. “That’s inevitably the case, so you err towards making it a better boat, but you can still make it a better car.” Sounds good to us, and given the bang-up job it's done on so many race and rally cars, we're looking forward to seeing what Prodrive can cook up.

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