A Belarussian company specializing in agricultural machinery recently unveiled a Formula 1 car built with tractor parts that can allegedly reach speeds of up to 320km/h (198mph)

The Russian city of Yekaterinburg recently hosted the Innoprom exhibition where over 150 companies from Russia and Belarus showcased their newest agricultural, construction, and transportation machinery. However, the ultimate stand-out was not a tractor, a combine, or an excavator, but a unique-looking Formula 1 car developed by Belarusian company Minsk Tractor Plant. At first glance, it looked like a slightly unusual racing car, but the more you looked at it, the more you spotted similarities to a tractor, which makes sense, considering that it was allegedly inspired by the company’s tractor-building pedigree and built using tractor parts.

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Mišo Kuzmanović, a mechanic from Bosnia, has spent two years and over $30,000 building his very own Formula One car. The 150hp vehicle doesn’t reach the top speeds of real race cars, but it’s still a sight to behold.

A big fan of motor sports Mišo Kuzmanović had always dreamed of driving a Formula 1 race car, but living in Bosnia, he never really got the opportunity. One day, the skilled mechanic from Prnjavor decided he was going to build his dream car from scratch, and two years ago he put his plan into motion. He bought an original Volkswagen engine, a gearbox but made a lot of the other car parts, the frame and the body himself, in his workshop . Some friends helped him with the paint job and sound system installation, but he did most of the work on the car himself. It required a lot of money, effort, patience and knowledge to complete, but Mišo says the moment he was finally able to get behind the driver’s seat and cruise around town in his bright Red Formula 1 car was one of the happiest of his life. He put around 1,000 hours of work into his dream, but it all paid off in the end. Kuzmanović’s hand-made Formula 1 vehicle leaves no neck unturned when it passes by, and he loves answering questions about his masterpiece wherever he goes.

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2010 was an exceptional year for Red Bull Racing, with Sebastian Vettel scoring the first Formula One World Championship title, in Abu Dhabi. To celebrate the event, Red Bull has created a life-size Formula One car replica, out of Red Bull bottles. The unique artwork is on display at a shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand, and is made up of 2,615 bottles of Red Bull energy drink.

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James Michael Harlan, an American designer and car enthusiast has spent three years building the White Lake Formula One Ring, a 1/32 scale Scalextric Formula One race course.

Complete with miniature race cars, pit crews, a podium, all set in a beautiful handcrafted landscape, the White Lake Formula One Ring is definitely this year’s ultimate boy’s toy. The four lane wide, 145-foot-long racetrack looks absolutely stunning, but what’s most astonishing is the fact that 39-year-old James Michael Harlan used common materials like copper tape, MDF, electrical wire and some paint to complete his masterpiece.

And it would be a shame to build such an amazing Formula 1 circuit and not use it for racing, right? As a true car racing fan, James Michael Harlan organizes race nights with around 30 people, with qualifying rounds, pit stops and everything else you can expect in a real Formula One race. He’s even been known to run 24-hour races, when the track is lit by sunlight during the day, and by track-level lighting, at night.

While he realizes this is not the kind of thing an exhibition designer usually builds, he admits he sometimes looks at it and realizes he’s created something truly amazing. So far he spent around $6,000 and 7,000 hours on his White Lake Formula One Ring, but he says he’s just getting started, as there are so many other things he want to add.

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I don’t know what it is about Formula 1 cars that makes people want to replicate them using the most unusual materials.

This time it’s Puma’s turn to make a life-size Formula 1 car out of cut-out shoe boxes.  The cardboard model was created in collaboration with UK-based Ben Wilson Design, and is meant to represent Puma’s ongoing relationship with motorsports.

The cardboard car was obviously very difficult to make. According to Ben Wilson himself, many Puma shoe boxes were used, especially in the development stage. First a real Formula 1 vehicle was scanned, then ‘ripped’ to pieces on the computer, and put together out of shoe box pieces, cut with an oscillating cutter.

The shoe box Formula 1 car is now on display at a Puma store in Chicago.

via PSFK

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