There’s nothing wrong with being fashionably late. With late-model Mustangs, Chargers, Camaros, and Thunderbirds all traversing American roads in retro fashion, the infamous thunder chicken was noticeably gone.
In the Firebird’s defense, it doesn’t help that Pontiac was shut down in 2009. That hasn’t stopped custom fabricator Kasim Tlibekov (Tlibekua) from imagining what a modern-day Firebird would look like. As it turns out, the answer is pretty damn mean.
More Curves than Jessica Rabbit
GM produced the Firebird until 2002, with four generations of the car roughly following the development of the Chevy Camaro with which it shared a platform. Tlibekov’s take on the car borrows heavily from the first-generation Firebird, blending some seriously wide hips and lovely rounded fenders into the vintage car’s basic shape.
He asserts that unlike attempts from other builders, this car is not a Camaro in bodywork. It is a one-hundred-percent original design from the ground up.
Check out My Good Side
The front three-quarter view is probably the car’s best. You can spot the ’68-inspired grille and squared-off headlights. A large air damn gapes beneath them, perhaps feeding into a set of turbochargers a-la the “TT” designation. An aggressive splitter is suspended on wires, completing the look.
Black is unquestionably the right color for this car, and the dished seven-spoke wheels it wears complete the look nicely. They must be at least 11 inches wide in back to accommodate the race rubber this thing sports—complete with #Tlibekua stencils. Hoonigan eat your heart out.
Junk in the Trunk
Around back the concept displays some ’70s flair with a set of rear-window louvers. The sculpted cockpit blends nicely into the doorsills, but if we have any gripe about this design, it’s the car’s Kardashian-inspired rear end.
Tlibekov clearly wants to send the message that this car is powerful, and requires the immense grip that a widened rear-end as this provides. Where things get dicey is in the flared fenders that arch up above a set of tasteful first-gen-inspired taillights and then roll all the way around the sides of the car into a set of oval exhaust tips.
It’s not beyond help, and Tlibekov himself admits this is the last part of the car that needs more tweaking, but as it stands the back looks a little contrived as if he got lazy and tacked on the back of a Viper or AC Cobra.
Still, the overall design is stunning and looks drivable. We shouldn’t let a little extra in back keep anyone from having a good time. This seems to be a one-off project, so if you want your own build you’ll have to go for a body-kit, which is a pretty inexpensive way to get the job done. There’s only one question left to ask with this build though: What’s under the hood?