Last week this fly, phat, wicked rad C4 Corvette showed up on my Instagram feed. I snorted, assumed it was an illustration, and got on with my life. But how wrong I was! It’s real and it’s spectacular.
Casual research reveals that this car was created by Jim Björk, a Swedish car enthusiast with a history of having fun and flashyshow cars. But I have to say, I think this one-off widebody Vette is on another level.
Back in September 2019, the By Bjork Facebook page posted this image:
It’s cool that it’s captioned in both English and Swedish. I did study the Scandanavian language when I lived in Stockholm, but that was over a decade ago and all I remember are the drinking songs. (Helan går to my friends i Sverige!)
If you do tala svenska, you can get a full download on this car from an interview with Björk by YouTuber SIR_Pierre here:
For those of us who have to take translations at face value, we can see from the Facebook caption that Björk identifies the car as a Corvette C4 Greenwood.
Assuming that’s true, it actually means something: Greenwood wasa big name when it came to amplifying the fierceness of Corvettes for a long time. The company doesn’t appear to have updated its website in a while, but it and its proprietors John and Burt Greenwood turned out some extremely fast, wild-looking versions of Corvettes in their time.
Greenwood Corvettes, the company, has too much history (and probably backstory) to summarize in a little aside here. But suffice it to say; the outfit did serious tuning for track and street cars. It also created aesthetically bold body kits, like what appears to be on Björk’s C4 before its transformation under his direction.
Some Corvette fans would probably say that a nice-condition Greenwood C4 should be museum’d rather than messed with, and they’d have a strong argument for preserving historic status and resale value. But this blue Björkmobile is so outrageous, so bonkers, so beautifully hilarious, that I’m just happy it was brought into existence.
If you’re inclined to dig into the origin story, the By Bjork Facebook page has quite a few annotated work-in-progress pictures of the wheels, front bumper fitment, test-fitting the skirts and wing, and fender flares. One image I have to insist you check out is this one of the car’s ridiculous wheel, apparently made by Swedish shop Fälgfixarna:
I don’t like to cuss excessively in my writing but… holy fucking shit. I’ve been looking at custom cars for a long time and I have to admit I’ve never heard of someone widening a wheel in this way. I doubt this is the first instance, but, just, wow. I guess once you commit to building a show car, you don’t have to sweat safety or performance engineering too much. At least the welds look clean!
Many of the By Björk Facebook images of the Corvette under construction were shared from GME Lackering, which is the paint and body shop credited with doing some bodywork here and the respray in a color you might recognize as Porsche’s Miami Blue.
But the @by_bjork Instagram page is where you’ll find the deepest stash of shiny “completed” photos and shots of the car in progress. Check it:
What a buck nasty beastmobile that is. Instantly my favorite Corvette show car, without a doubt. Maybe one of my favorite show cars ever. And yes, I do like show cars and I ain’t even going to pretend to be ashamed.
While writing this I discovered that I’d been stung for my slacking and The Drive beat me to blogging about this car, noting that Björk’s “talking to companies about making replica kits available as soon as this fall.” That would be cool! But if you’re hoping to take advantage of how cheap fourth-generation Corvettes are and turning one into this yourself, don’t get too excited, because any body kit this complex will cost many times more than the nicest C4 on your local Craigslist. And as for the price of installation and a paint job this good, well, I don’t think Björk’s car is in much danger of being imitated any time soon.
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