It doesn’t take long in my interview with ‘Mad’ Mike Whiddett for an unplanned question to become obvious.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever had a car you haven’t modified?
“Negative,” Whiddett says. “I can’t leave anything alone, bro. Like, it’s just one of those things, I think. It’s… part of, I don’t know… yeah, I just can’t leave anything alone.”
And the automotive world is a better place for Mad Mike’s need to be creative. Over the span of his career, that has taken him from Junior Motocross in his native New Zealand to drifting around the world, he has built some of the world’s wildest and most fascinating four-wheeled vehicles.
From his early days as a Mazda fanatic, and thanks to his long-time sponsor Red Bull, Mad Mike has created some amazing machines, from the RADBUL (a quad-rotor Mazda MX-5) to the NIMBUL (a drift-spec Lamborghini Huracan) and even his one-of-a-kind, five-rotor drift version of a Mazda 787B Le Mans racer. His latest creation, the MADMAC, is a rotary-powered, drift-spec McLaren P1.
So what does a man who has built some of the world’s most desirable cars dream about putting in his ideal three-car garage? We spoke to Mad Mike and found out…
Daily driver: Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2
While he’s most famous associated with Mazda, it says a lot about Whiddett’s widespread appeal that he actually works with multiple brands. In addition to his McLaren, he recently signed on as an ambassador for General Motors Specialty Vehicles (GMSV), so has a new Silverado 1500 ZR2 in his expansive garage.
“So right now actually I’ve got this ZR2, so my next dream project is actually chopping this thing up and wide-bodying it, doing some crazy [stuff]. I want to turn it into like a full-Baja-style truck but more like a pre-runner spec, so it’s like a Baja truck with air-conditioning and that’ll be my dream daily.”
But that’s not the only Chevy he’s driving, with a bigger Silverado 2500 also part of his fleet for when he needs to tow his or his son’s race cars around.
“So right now we’ve got the 2500 and the ZR2 which I’m kind of like bouncing between at the moment. So it’s kind of the dream set-up right there, really. The 2500 obviously is a fricking unit when it comes to towing and its capabilities, you know, we were fortunate to do the film shoot with GM for the official launch of our partnership and we just couldn’t even find the limit [with it].”
Something special: Mazda RX-7 MADBUL
How do you choose something special from an entire fleet of special cars? It’s actually an easy choice for Whiddett – it’s the car that made him who he is today.
MADBUL started life as a third-generation FD Mazda RX-7 but thanks to Mad Mike’s modifications it has become a global automotive icon. When Red Bull wanted to send Max Verstappen drifting with Whiddett, this was the car he chose.
Powered by a four-rotor engine and returned to its original look after a brief stint with an RX-3 front end grafted on, this is more than just a car to Whiddett, explaining its origins are key to his current position in life.
“Well, a car that’s the most special thing to my heart is MADBUL,” he says. “You know, that’s my OG drift car. It’s a 1992 Mazda RX-7. That I paid $5,000 for, and at that point in my life, like, $5,000 was so much money, and man. We sold my old Mazda 808 station wagon, which I did all the New Zealand Skid Fest competitions, burnout competitions at Four and Rotary Nationals, and that was, for me, was kind of the pinnacle. I was doing freestyle motocross at the time and then I’d go and take out our old rotaries. So I sold that car, my wife, Toni, she was doing car shows, so she had a Mercedes-Benz that we’d rotor-swapped and done all this other stuff.
“So we sold both these cars, plus our TV, VHS player, DVD players, like all the stuff we had back then, to be able to afford this RX 7 to transform it into a drift car and it’s crazy. I still have that car to this day. That’s the one Max Verstappen got to drive last year. So that’s the one car, man, that would like, if I had to get rid of every single car I own and I was only allowed to keep one, you know, of all the crazy builds we’ve done, the MADBUL’s the one, it’s literally built everything I had. It’s literally an extension of my body.”
Track toy: McLaren P1 ‘MADMAC’
Not to get repetitive but picking a favourite from such a diverse fleet of desirable cars doesn’t feel like an easy task, but once again he finds his answer quickly. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise in such a fast-paced life he is attracted to his latest creation.
Built in partnership between Whiddett’s MADLAB in New Zealand and McLaren specialist, Dean Lanzante, his rotary-powered McLaren was just finished when Torquecafe interviewed him.
“Oh mate, you know, I’ve been very fortunate through my career, so when people are like, ‘man, what’s your dream car?’ Well, each one of my cars I’ve built has literally been the dream of that point in my life,” he says. “And that’s whether we’re building a car for a championship, whether we’re building a car for a film shoot, you know whether we’re just building a car for a mega challenge of our own selves.
“Now, we’ve just been doing this McLaren, you know, with the rotor-swap and we’ve just been fortunate enough to just have the first kind of shakedowns of that car in the last week. It is the scariest, craziest thing I’ve ever driven by far. It’s like power-to-weight, you know, the technology we’ve put into the engine and then just the whole chassis and stuff itself. It really is something wild.”
Listen to the MADMAC run up the Goodwood Festival of Speed hill below:
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