4WDrive's favs & not-so SEMA project vehicles - Part 1

Story & photos by Budd Stanley, additional photos by Bryan Irons

4WDrive’s SEMA Awards - Our favourite and most hated project vehicles on location at SEMA

The 2015 SEMA show is now in the books. We’ve staggered onto the first flight back to Canada, loaded down with business cards, product catalogs and memory sticks jammed full of wish lists. Our knees are screaming after 14-hours of hiking a day, our feet are numb, but we arrived home grinning from ear to ear, drunk from the overdose of concentrated automotive magnificence, oxygen enriched casinos and a daily dose of Red Bull.

This year we are going to change things up a bit. Rather than just show you some of the sights of SEMA, we are actually going to award the best and worst project vehicles we came face to face with over our four-day experience. Some are fantastic, some are fantastically painful. With that, we give you our 4WDrive SEMA Show awards, a culmination and celebration of all that was great… and not so great, at this year’s event - Part 1.

1 Made to Look Hard, But Not Award: Senlips – It was insulting that an obvious foam and bondo constructed front end was attempted to be passed as fabricated steel, and that’s just the start, just too much fail going on here.

2 Look at Me Award: Fab4 Mohawk JK – Fab4 had surprized us last year with a rather extreme looking Jeep Wrangler JK, but this year they took it too an all new level – really, a mohawk guys?

3 Recipe for Disaster Award: RBP Ram – We could go into the pros and cons of carrying heavy weight above your vehicles centre of gravity, mostly the cons. However, driving a lifted Ram 3500 on soft suspension with a Jeep JK on top, also lifted and with soft suspension just goes beyond words.

4 No Way in Hell This Thing Will Ever See Dirt Award: Most of the Brodozers found outside will likely never see anything other than a trailer and a local boulevard in which to show off the size and colours of the truck. This however, we bet money, will never see dirt, the owner was near tears that it had water spots on it after a freak rain shower.

5 Prettiest Use of Paint on the Undercarriage Award: We don’t even remember which one of the Brodozers this was, but all we know is that painting custom graphics on control arms loses 12 man points and you have no place in an off-road magazine unless we are going to laugh at you.

6 Scared of the Dark Award: Hima Hummer – The explosion in popularity for LED light bars is a frightening trend. Placing light bars in front of other lightbars for the sake of having more is just ridiculous. After eight tries, we counted no less than 44 separate LED lamps on this mahoosive Humvee, 34 on front alone.

There you have our first 6. Stay tuned, there's lot's more to come.