Lech Lebiedowski has spent his career working with aircraft from the past, but his real passion lies closer to the ground and looks like something from the future.
He owns a DeLorean car with stainless steel plating, gull-wing doors, nuclear vents and a flux capacitor — an exact replica of the one Marty McFly used in the 1985 film Back to the Future.
But much like the fictional machine it was modelled after, his DeLorean is unreliable.
“You don’t know when it’s going to quit or when it will start,” Lebiedowski said in an interview Friday with CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM.
“It’s definitely not the best vehicle that was ever built but it’s still pretty futuristic. Even in 2019, it still looks pretty impressive.”
Curator of the Alberta Aviation Museum, Lebiedowski has been working on the replica for more than a decade.
It took him eight years to track down all the parts, and another two to assemble them.
Now complete, the car still can’t match the performance of the plutonium-fuelled original.
Lebiedowski has no hopes of traversing the space-time continuum. The car has a hard enough time navigating the pothole-ridden streets of Edmonton.
He rarely takes the car on the road, and uses it mainly to help raise money for charity events.
“The car will never do 88 miles per hour, which is required to make it operational as a time machine,” he said.
“At about 80 km/h, it shakes so violently. I don’t think I could venture very far. It’s definitely not a daily driver.”
‘Pure magic’
Lebiedowski’s love for the car traces back to his childhood in Poland. Back to the Future was the first western film he ever saw.
Even without the benefit of subtitles, something about the movie floored him.
He skipped school for the next three weeks to watch every showing of the film at the local theatre.
“It was pure magic,” Lebiedowski said.
He wanted to be like Doc Brown — the eccentric scientist who invented the time machine — and thinks his current work as a history professor has a lot to do with his early obsession with the character.
“I guess to western society, to kids and adults here, it was just a brilliant comedy or time-travel movie,” he said. “But for me, when Marty McFly was travelling through time and Doc Brown built the time machine, it was real.
“I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie. I felt like, it’s happening, it’s really happening.”
The car will be on display at the Alberta Aviation Museum on Saturday during the MAGnum Opus Charity Art Show, a benefit raising money for iHuman Youth Society.
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