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CA: But the seat definitely worked out like you planned.

SB: Oh yeah, the seat. . . you know the seat was the first thing we built on the interior, because that was the main part of the concept we really wanted to get across. The rest of the details on the interior kind of fell into place as we went along. We weren't a hundred percent sure exactly what we wanted to do. We knew we had a basic concept, but until you get in there and see the spaces, you just don't know.

The center seat mechanism electronically motors out from the chassis of the Mini Cooper so the driver can climb in.

Like the monitor — that was really one of those things that just came up. Mike and I started talking about it, about the idea of having one of the monitors come through the arms for the other two monitors. So, it just gives it a neat look. It really gives you a good display in the front of the car with the monitors, a lot of gauges, and of course optimal speaker positioning for 5.1.

Monitors are positioned on interlocking arms that seem to swoop in towards the driver's seat.

CA: It seems like you carried over some elements from last year's car [the Honda Civic Si]. Like with the gauges coming out like that, a little bit of the wraparound cage look, you know?

SB: Well, yeah ...

MV: That's kind of our style, the Alpine trademark, you know.

SB: ... it's just the way that we think, and the way that we ... I guess that's what you're seeing there, the similarity is really just the way that we approach a project.

CA: And sort of the paint, a little bit? I mean obviously Alpine blue is what's tying that together.

SB: Right.

CA: You had the same guy do the paint job again?

SB: We did. We did it a little differently this year. We actually started the car off with silver. So we basecoated and clearcoated the car silver, then he did all the actual blue and lightning, and all the additional color on top of it. So that allowed him a lot of creativity, to add darkness and leave lightness where he wanted to. He could get a lot more shadow. If you look at this car next to the Civic, it has a much more dynamic paint scheme in terms of the color, shifting from one color to the other. Of course, the Civic's much more dark, more of a solid color. So we were real happy with the way that that came out, and we wanted to get away from the kind of human interface, the human aspect of the paint with the Civic — the underwater theme. This is more of a biomechanical kind of theme. Lightning, you know, mechanical stuff. We actually took some electronic stuff apart and showed him what the circuit boards looked like, some of the gears in the DVD player, some of the amplifiers.

CA: So that was his inspiration.

SB: If you look on the hood, you can see a lot of the influences of that.

Circuit boards from amps and the internals of the mobile DVD player were part of the inspiration for the paint scheme.

CA: Yeah! That's great.

SB: So that kind of gives him an idea of what to go with.