Do you mind if I rip this intro straight from Wikipedia? Cool. Thanks

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced.

In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king and founder of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

Well now, millennia later, we can ask the same question of the MIG-U1.

The MIG-U1 is an outlandish hypercar built by the madmen at German tuning company, Gemballa. Right from the early 80s, Gemballa were building ludicrous cars with wacky names; Avalanche, Mirage GT, Cyrrus and Mistrale to name a few. These cars are over-the-top and in-your-face, and look exactly like the sort of monstrosities that 12 year old me was "building" in Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

As it was a tuning company and not a manufacturer, customers would need to bring a donor car that would receive the Gemballa treatment. The Mistrale for example was based on a Porsche Panamera; not a wildly expensive or rare car and something that I imagine one could donate with little guilt. The Mirage GT however was based on a Porsche Carrera GT - only 1200 or so were ever made - now that’s a much bigger decision to make before sacrificing one to the German tuning gods

The MIG-U1 however is on a whole different level. Because it’s based on a Ferrari Enzo, and fewer than 500 of them were ever made. Nevertheless, a customer in Dubai decided they wanted to offer up their Ferrari Enzo to Gemballa to deliver something unique. And deliver they did.

Despite the fact that Gemballa offered to make 25 of these insane machines, only 1 was ever made. In fact the name MIG-U1 comes from the initials of the owner, U for Uwe (the founder of Gemballa), and 1 for production unit 1 (of 1). Couple that with the fact that this was the last car that Uwe Gemballa made before he was murdered by gangsters, and you’ve got yourself a seriously unique car. It’s rumoured that the owner was offered $10m for it, about $6-7m more than a standard Enzo.

Even before you start looking at the wild bodykit and upgraded interior, just the fact alone that it’s finished in a white and black colour scheme makes it stand out amongst a sea of red Enzos. But then you notice the more aggressive front splitter. The completely new hood with intakes and louvres. The huge roof scoop to help keep the engine cool in the blisteringly hot Dubai desert. The vertically arranged exhaust pipes mantled by the coffee-table sized fixed wing on the back. And on the inside, even the Ferrari shields and badges have been replaced by those of Gemballa. The longer you look, the harder it becomes to find any remaining parts from the donor Enzo. And that’s because Gemballa really built the MIG-U1 from scratch. Stripping away every piece, panel and component of the original car, and building new ones from lightweight carbon fibre.

Which leaves us with the philosophical question

If you take a Ferrari Enzo and one by one replace all of its parts with new ones, is it still the same Ferrari Enzo you had at the beginning?

Personally, I would say no. What you have now is incredibly unique Gemballa MIG-U1 that has nothing to do with a Ferrari Enzo. And I can bet that if you asked Ferrari’s famously over-protective legal division, they’d probably agree too

If you want to know more about Gemballa and the MIG-U1, check out these videos

📺 Gemballa MIG-U1 - Startup and Driving in Monaco by Shmee150

📺 Why Was the '90s Biggest Porsche Tuner Killed By Gangsters? by Donut

📺 1 of 2, $2 Million Gemballa Extremo RUF by CuratedTV

📺 Gemballa Avalanche Restoration Complete! by CuratedTV

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This post is part of my #WeblogPoMo2024 series. You can see the rest of the blogs in this series here