He learned to race, he says reluctantly, “on the roadways, running from the cops,” he said. He became well-known on street-rod message boards, and soon people were bringing him their cars for Lundy to tune into speedsters. He had learned the ins and outs of engines working on a boat and the Dodge Dakota used to haul it from his grandfather, a former Naval engineer. News ranked the top high school in North Carolina, where he studied set and lighting design, but preferred to spend his evenings working on his Hondas and at a local restaurant to pay for parts. He was accepted to the prestigious Durham School of the Arts, which U.S. Neither Matt Lundy nor the single mother who raised him was sure what he was going to grow up to be. He tore off the Ford’s original supercharger and installed a pair of twin turbos he designed and already the Ford was inching past the 200 mph mark.ĭespite his self-taught mechanics, he need someone with vision to move his dream forward.Īnd that’s when he met a “cocky” kid less than two years out of trade school. Within a week, the brand-new GT was in pieces in his garage, as he began to work. “I wanted to do something nobody else was doing.” “I dumped all my money into this racing stuff with a dream,” Bohmer said. So, at its height in 2007, he sold his business at its height and the surrounding real estate he’d bought over the years for millions, he said, with the goal of going faster than anyone had gone before. That is, racing from a standstill to reaching one mile faster than any other car, at the highest top speed on record. He had bought the white Ford with the blue racing stripes - a car whose heritage traces back to the Ford GT40, the first American car to win the 24 Hours of LeMans - to help it break another kind of record.īohmer decided he wanted to make the Ford GT the fastest street-legal car to run a standing mile. “Johnny decided, ‘I got to have one of these.’”īut he had a bigger, secret plan. “He wanted the car in the worst way,” remembers the salesman Tom Donlin. With business soaring, he bought a brand new 2006 Ford GT from Wayne Akers Ford in Lake Worth for the sticker price of $170,000. He would use them to move here and open a heavy-equipment sales and rental business in West Palm Beach, near Military Trail, that he would own for more than 20 years. ![]() Restoring cars became an obsession that eventually led him to buy a load of broken down forklifts. ![]() I’ve done some crazy things,” Bohmer said. As a teenager, when he wasn’t in school, working in a coal mine or working at a horseracing track, he was restoring classic muscle caras and motorcycles and flipping them for cash. This racing dream team wasn’t built overnight.īohmer started riding motorcycles at 7 like his two much-older brothers, and then racing on dirt tracks at 9, near Lexington, Kentucky. The 300-mph barrier awaits as the ultimate test later this year, for driver, designer and machine. In October, with the innovation of lead designer Matt Lundy, a 25-year-old reformed street-rod racer, and his own $170,000 Ford GT - augmented with untold dollars and countless hours in their small shop near the Palm Beach International Airport- Bohmer broke the Guinness World Record for fastest street car by going zero-to-283 mph in a mile.Īctually, they broke their own previous record of 223 mph, which they set as a baseline knowing they could go even faster.Īnd the Big Three aren’t done yet. “Going 250 (mph) in a car was a bucket-list thing for me,” explains Johnny Bohmer, 52, a West Palm Beach resident who did that and much more. Dreams this big and crazy always have something to do with South Florida. Finally, they needed perhaps the most daring character itself, a chariot to chase windmills: the car with the pedigree to do it.Īnd, like anything else wacky, it doesn’t hurt if this all happens in South Florida. Then, there had to be someone to help build the car. Like good news and bad news, it had to come in threes.įirst, there had to be someone whose dream it was to break the world record for fastest mile in a street car.
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