Neon... it's a Gas

IF YOU'RE SCREAMING down the motorway and this Chrysler Neon appears in your rearview mirror, you might just mistake it for a wide-mouthed bullfrog having the biggest shit of its life.

If you pull over, you'll see a straining of another sort as the frog struggles to turn its 20in wheels quickly enough to get past.

It might look like it's powered by the devil's stomach juices, and its bodykit is the widest you'll find anywhere, but this Chrysler Neon is just about the slowest car in the world.

For the first time in my life, however, I don't care about raw speed, and there are three very good reasons: 

This Max'd Neon is the epitome of cutting edge. It has everything a Max car should have plus ten, and it's the only one on the planet.

There will not be another. But there's one question I have to ask Jamie from Panasonic: "Why did you choose the painfully uncool Chrysler Neon as the starting point for the project?" "Because it was free!" is his straight-up reply. "Plus Panasonic and Chrysler have a good relationship anyway - we supplied all the UK Neon's with standard Panasonic ICE."

He's clearly proud of the car, but modest too. "The people who deserve the thanks are Dimma who built the car. Ah, Dimma. What can be said of the body styling gods of Cheshire that hasn't been said before? If you need your car pumped up like a blowfish on helium, Terry and friends at Dimma will be the first to say "we can do that"

"When I took the standard car to Dimma and told them what I wanted, they just got on with it," says Jamie. "There was no shrugging of shoulders, no sucking through teeth - they just grabbed the angle grinder and before my very eyes they cut from just below the bootlid, all the way across the rear door and down to the sill. There was no going back after that!"

Dimma's wide-arch kit for the 306 was drastically modified to fit the Neon, but you can still see a hint of it in the front and rear bumpers. For me, though, the most arresting features are the rear doors and arches.

These arches begin to swell out just behind the front doors and the rear door handles have been removed, which makes the car look more like a coupe than a saloon, Alfa 156-style.

A car with bigger arches than a railway viaduct needs huge wheels, and ladies and gentlemen, what you're seeing here, for the second time in as many months, is a car with 20in rims. Are they catching on? We hope so.

 Seventeens look like stabilizer wheels next to these 20in Compomotive split-rims, and there are F1 cars out there which could do with the grip the 285/30 Pirelli P-Zeros offer.

Designed for the Ferrari F40, don't cha know......  The brakes are from the Chrysler Viper.

If the 13in discs are good enough for America's 378bhp supercar, they're certainly good enough for this 130bhp Neon.

The suspension had been radically altered to provide the much-needed arch clearance for the massive wheels, and to enable the five-stud hubs to go on. It's also fitted with fully adjustable coilovers. But the really trick suspension componenets are the race-car -style rose joints. The lack of rubber bushes in rose joints means 'slack' is almost non-existent and caster angles can be fine tuned. If you're one of those freaks who doesn't find 20in wheels and a Dimma kit hornier than Gail Porter's nipple ring, there are three TV screens under the boot lid, and one in the dash to keep your pecker up.

We stood next to the boot watching a good half an hour of True Lies on DVD at an outdoor car park in the middle of Kent - something of a weird experience.

"You should see the Japanese porn you can get on DVD," says Jamie, "You can zoom in and out and pan the camera around to any angle you want" Now that's what we call interactive.

Aside from the endless hours of fun you'll have watching Samurai Sex Party, the ICE system consists of the very latest Panasonic hardware. There are four amps, four subs, mids and tweets mounted in the doors, the latest head unit - which glows blue in the dark - and a CD multichanger, Interior blue/black alcantara retrim. Trick or what?

If you do see this Chrysler Neon in your rearview mirror, there's a good chance it's going to a show or a cruise. Panasonic are planning to take it to every event possible in 1999, and that includes the fastest loudest car show ever - Max Power Live at Birmingham's NEC from July 2-4. Be there and check it out, I guarantee that you'll find yourself fancying a wide-mouthed bullfrog. I did........