GENESIS, BOOK TWO; RHYS MILLEN MAKES RACING VERSION OF HYUNDAI COUPE BEFORE U.S. DEBUT.(NEWS)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

PERHAPS THE MOST amazing thing about this sleek new Hyun-dai Genesis SEMA show coupe from Rhys Millen Racing is not that it features a 500-hp turbocharged engine in a lightweight carbon-fiber body and a structure ready to race in the JGTC or that it was built on a shoestring budget by a small crew working long into the night for many nights.

No, the most amazing thing about it is that Rhys Millen Racing finished the car three weeks before SEMA.

In the tuner world, where most cars are being painted inside the trailer on the way to Vegas, where "yes means "probably not and $14,000 means $255,617 or more, where everyone expects everyone else to be at least exaggerating or at most lying, building cars from stolen parts and repainting each car 14 times to fake homologation, Rhys Millen Racing brought a car in on time and under budget! We knowwe saw it roll out of the trailer and drive around a racetrack exactly three weeks before SEMA. And that was two days after Millen won the triple crown of drifting using largely the same crew that was building the show car. Kudos, Rhys!

And it's a nice car, we thought, as it was being backed ever so gently out of the trailer and onto the tarmac before us, forcing us to reassess our former belief not only in tuners but in all of humanity itself. Maybe in Hyundai, too, because, as we said, it's a nice-looking car. It looks like a show car that might be as much show as go, as the kids say.

"We wanted to take something that looks statically appealing, something that you would see at a car show, but which also has all of the form and function of a race car, said Millen, who should be in some sort of sleep-rehab clinic but instead was talking to us.

The car looks more like a race car than anything else. Indeed, Millen said the main influence comes from the Japanese road-racing series JGTC, specifically the GT300 class, "a modified street-car sort of thing.