THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR DRIVING
“IT’S NOT A DELICATE FLOWER. IF YOU FLIP IT ON ITS ROOF, DON’T WORRY. WE’LL JUST ROLL IT OVER AND KEEP GOING.”
As pep talks go, this one is being filed under ‘encouraging’. I’m in the middle of the Mexican desert, sweating heavily into the underside of a five-point harness, having ratcheted myself down into one of the most bizarre-looking and perplexingly engineered road cars on the planet. With exposed bodywork, the headlight structure of a jumping spider, huge off-road tyres, supersized suspension and Tonka-toy dimensions, it’s all rather imposing. Especially as it wears a supercharged V8 engine like a teenager’s rucksack, has a roof-mounted snorkel and two Gatling gun exhausts straddling a full-size spare. It’s a visual assault. One that could easily be mistaken for some sort of childish marketing joke – a 1:1 scale cereal box toy or something. But it isn’t. It’s a very serious, very real, very four-eyed, 650bhp middle finger to the Lamborghini Urus, Rolls-Royce Cullinan and Aston Martin DBX.
It’s called the SCG Boot, the latest project from film director, car collector, race team owner and car manufacturer Jim Glickenhaus. If you don’t know the name, in recent years Jim and his iconoclastic Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus (SCG) outfit have made a name for themselves by ditching rose-tinted spectacles for reality by putting deepfakes on hardcore motoring nostalgia. Take the P4/5, his $3m coachbuilt Enzo throwback that initially went down at Ferrari like a mouthful of sick. Modulo, the extraterrestrial concept wedge from
