Faster and Furious

Rob Tirollo of Cape Coral, Fla., is an actor. Granted, he may not be an actor of the same caliber as Denzel Washington in "Training Day," or even Ice Cube in "Friday," but he does have some acting experience under his belt and I'm assuming he has a Screen Actor's Guild card to prove it. The only movie I've seen with Rob in it is Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm," but no matter how close I zoom in with my DVD player, I can't tell if it's him driving the car or not.
What does all this have to do with the 2001 Eclipse you see here? There's a saying "like father, like son"-and while Rob may not have sired the car you see here it is his baby and it, too, is slated to appear on the silver screen in the sequel to that infamous "import scene" movie, tentatively titled "2Fast, 2Furious." Yes, Rob has taken his show car into show business.
There are three things about Rob's car that truly make it stand out in the show scene. The first is the highly detailed paint scheme, courtesy of Pro Comp Custom Paint and Body in Cape Coral. The bulk of the car has a silver-and-blue splash scheme, highlighted with a patterned square theme. The main eye-candy, however, is the Samurai character on the hood. Seeing Tirollo's design come to fruition involved hand sketching, brush detailing, and final airbrushing of the major components by Bruce Harvey, painter extraordinaire at Pro Comp. The precision hoodwork, along with the rest of the detailed paint scheme, was enough to attract the attention of the producers of the upcoming John Singleton feature. In fact, although the redesigned Eclipse would be appearing in a cameo role in the movie, the high-rolling Paramount crew decided to have four more vehicles painted to match Tirollo's work-just so they could crash them.
The supporting cast for the custom paint job includes a full Razzi body kit (also installed and painted by Pro Comp), billet aluminum gas door, diamond-plate front skid panel and an APR Performance Mini-drag Wing. In order to deal with the potholes Tirollo might encounter while filming his next mega-blockbuster hit, the suspension was upgraded with Eibach Pro-Kit springs and front-and-rear matching AEM Big Brakes. Rolling stock consists of 18-in. Katana Destiny wheels mounted with Nitto NT-555 tires of the 235/40 variety. All of the suspension and rolling-stock items were sourced and installed at All Sports Audio/Performance in Cape Coral.
The second outstanding feature on this car is the custom Lamborghini-style door conversion. While we've featured cars with this conversion before, none (to my knowledge) have retained the ability to open the doors in either the stock configuration or in the jack-knifed position. Additionally, I shouldn't be so quick to use the word "custom"-it implies this conversion is a one-off labor process, never to be seen on another car again. Au contraire, mon frere-I won't even go there lest Eric at Import Precision VLS, purveyor of fine door conversions, beat me with a billet aluminum rod. Eric spent two weeks engineering, designing and building the door kit from scratch. Yes, boys and girls, I did say "kit"; keep your eyes posted for more applications in the future. Since these doors attract a lot of attention, I figured they would naturally open up to something good inside. While an initial visual inspection revealed that Brooke Burke was not sitting in the passenger seat, I was still pleasantly surprised to find a custom two-tone leather interior treatment, administered by Custom Soft Trim of Ft. Myers, Fla., and a Pioneer AVX-P7300 DVD/VCD/CDA/ABBA Player, even though most of you aren't old enough to appreciate the band that produced the disco epic "Dancing Queen." Still, Brooke, ABBA, all that leather, and the custom four-point double rollbar (think of it as a pole for dancing) constructed by Marty Motors Custom Race Fabrication would have made a mighty fine Hollywood-style party-perfect for Tirollo's acting aspirations. The final third of Tirollo's show business equation is actually the "go-business" of his car-the engine work. All of the performance goodies are bolt-ons, but that doesn't stop a lot of up-and-coming Hollywood actresses and it didn't stop Tirollo, either. The best aspect of the car (which was completed after our photo shoot and therefore not included in all these pretty pictures) is the Vortech V5 G-trim supercharger, custom installed by Ripp Modifications. Supported by an HKS blow-off valve and AFR, RC Engineering injectors, AMSS headers, and a dual 2.5-in. exhaust system, this car is ready to knock Michael J. Fox's gull-winged DeLorean back into the '80s where it belongs. A ZEX dry nitrous system, jetted for 75 units of whoop-ass, will make sure it stays there, flux capacitor or not.
There you have it. Who needs a mediocre monochromatic paint job when you can floss it like Tirollo's Eclipse? Who needs a hardtop when a droptop is the only way to show your goods down A1A Beachfront Avenue? Who needs Vin Diesel when you have Rob and his show-winning, boosted-NOS-sniffing Eclipse?