Cobblers wear bad shoes. They stand at the bench all day repairing soles for people who can pay, and the pair they came home in last night still has the same split in the seam it had a month ago. The leather, the thread, the know-how are all on the bench in front of them. The customer shoes get fixed because the customer shoes pay rent. The cobbler's own pair? It's always later. It's the same with the car guy who builds for everybody else, except the bad shoes are a project car on jack stands in the corner of the garage, paint half stripped, parts in boxes labeled in marker, going on six years. You don't look at builder cars. There's no reason to. Then there's the rare one you do.
Justin Cashmore builds cars for friends, and the Renault Dauphine sitting low and wide in front of you, chrome bumpers and all, is the one he built for himself. When he talks about why it had to be him doing the building, he reaches for sandwiches. "When somebody else makes your sandwich, it's always going to be a little bit different than how you would have made it. When you make your own sandwich, you make it exactly how you want it. It may not be as good as the other person would have made it. But it's exactly the way you want it."
This what he has made for himself. The way Justin describes the build is closer to a model car than a restoration. "It's like an RC car. The shell is what the Renault is. Everything else is what I built." The shell is roof, hood, decklid, rear apron, and maybe 3 or 4 inches of original metal around each of the wide-body fenders. Inside the shell, nothing is Renault anymore.
The Dauphine the shell came from was postwar France's answer to nothing in particular. It was aimed at housewives, built to get to the market and back. The colors were chosen by a Parisian fashion model, the interior fabric patterns by women. Four doors, 848cc in the back, a 3-speed transmission, sliding rear windows because rolling them down cost too much, a swing axle that would roll the car over for the same reason the Corvair did. Modern front discs and independent front suspension sat next to a transmission that belonged in the 1940s. Renault built millions. Most rotted into the rain, lost to time and entropy. This one waited for the rust gods in the California desert since the late 60s.
He never saw a Dauphine built to an extreme. So he built one. Under the back seat is a 3.2L VR6 out of a first-gen Porsche Cayenne. A Vortech supercharger helps it breathe. The transmission is a 6-speed VW running transverse, like a Clio. The suspension is his own work, an amalgamation of Mk4 Volkswagen front spindles and lower arms, reworked into upper-and-lower arms. There's NASCAR take-off sway bars and the rear coilovers are off a Yamaha R1, a holdover from when the build was still a budget build. The shift knob is a bike handlebar grip. The whole car is right-hand drive because he lived in Japan for three years and it just felt right when he started building it. Added complexity for no reason other than he just wanted to. 
The drive is what you'd expect when you take a 2,140-pound car, plant a supercharged VR6 behind the seats, and run it on cage-stiffened pushrod suspension. It points where you aim it and finds more grip than it needs. Justin used to ride sport bikes. He stopped when his daughter was born. He needed the visceral hit back with a semblance of safety around him.
It has no power steering, no power brakes, no traction control. The differential is an LSD. The pedal is drive-by-wire because the ecu demands it. Otherwise it's all in the drivers hands.
Cars are getting easier to drive every year. Lane assist, automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise, the steering wheel that tugs gently when you drift across the white line. Phones answer themselves and refrigerators reorder groceries. Every system that touches us is built to take a decision off our plate. Most of us let them. Justin built a car that refuses.
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