THE NEED FOR SPEED

Mukundi has spent four years building his very own Lamborghini from scratch

- LESEGO MKHIZE

ANYONE who’s ever done it will tell you there’s not much to compare with the feeling of power and freedom that comes from chewing up the highway in a Lamborghini – an agile, low-slung, high-performance supercar with few rivals.

As a little boy, Mukundi Malovhele dreamt of getting behind the wheel of one of these babies and putting pedal to the metal but he knew his dream was a far-fetched one.

After all, this car goes for big, big bucks – in South Africa, a second-hand Lamborghini costs between R2 million and R4m, and a brand new one goes for a cool R5m – and you’d have to be mega-rich or mega-foolish to buy one.

So Mukundi (21) did the next best thing: he built a Lamborghini for himself. And it’s one like no other.

Sleek and low to the ground, Mukundi’s two-seater Lambo is a labour of love, a DIY project to which he devoted four years of his spare time and cash and built from the ground up.

“I thought, ‘Why wait until I have money when I can use my skills to redesign and make it?’” says Mukundi, who hails from Tshipise TshasagoleNiani village in Limpopo.

Creating his car required scrap metal, old car parts and heaps of ingenuity.

“I asked community members for any scrap metal they could spare, which I used to create the chassis of the vehicle with a hammer and welding machine,” he explains, adding that he designed the car from pictures of Lamborghinis, a little help from online kit car guides and YouTube videos.

It took him about a year to build the chassis and he then set about collecting sheets of zinc for the car’s exterior.