Rex Roy: Car culture

New Corvette electric, but too small to be street legal

I have to admit, I didn't know where New Hudson was when the press release arrived announcing a media event at Pratt & Miller Engineering, a firm known for fielding some of the fastest road-racing Corvettes ever. (For kindred geographic ignoramuses, New Hudson bumps against Wixom.)

The event announced an important milestone, Pratt & Miller's first electric Corvette. Even more exciting is the firm's smaller, lighter-weight Corvette is actually a build-it-yourself design. It's certainly a cause for celebration.

Pratt & Miller's newest Corvette is a 1/18 th scale model that can be built at Detroit's two Ridemakerz store locations (Twelve Oaks and Great Lakes Crossing).

Small, but efficient

Ridemakerz offers kids the chance to build cars the same way Build-A-Bear shops lets them make stuffed animals. These cars can be outfitted with electric-powered motors controlled by a wireless handset: perfect for racing around the living room. With this kind of racing, the only "harmful" C02 emissions come from the excited pilots.

While at the event, I talked with Gary Pratt, co-founder of the racing team and engineering firm that opened in 1989. An Ann Arbor native, Gary started racing soapbox derby cars and go-karts when he was a kid.

As he tells it, "By the early 1970s, I was racing all over -- at Flat Rock, Mount Clemens, and Toledo. I learned how to build racecars just so that I could keep driving. When I realized that I needed to actually earn a living, that's when I figured out that I could build cars for other racers. You could say that that was the beginning of what you see here."

Pratt & Miller's modern, surgically clean 100,000 square-foot facility employees 140 engineers, fabricators, mechanics and other craftsmen who work on the Corvette Racing program, as well as an impressive array of other projects for the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

Pratt says, "My partner, Jim Miller, visualized what we could become as an engineering firm, so we're now much more than just a shop that builds fast race cars."

And, for the bigger kids ...

While Pratt & Miller's unseen engineering business gives the company a certain gravitas -- as in they're not a collection of talented hayseed mechanics -- the firm is still best known for winning eight straight GT1 Manufacturers Championships in Chevrolet Corvettes. On this Gary Pratt happily reflects, "Yeah, I guess all this shows I've come a long way from those soapbox derby cars."

If the Ridemakerz version of the Pratt & Miller Corvette C6RS is too small for you, Gary Pratt and his crew from New Hudson know how to make full-size iterations. Bring a sixth-generation Corvette plus a Santa-size bag of money ($187,000), and the shop will complete the 600-horsepower, 202 mph transformation with the same expertise that has earned them so many championships.

Rex Roy can be contacted through www.RexRoy.net.