Built out of one man’s desire to create a vehicle entirely of his own imagination, Ron Will’s Turbo Phantom is a vehicle dedicated to form and superior design.

This three-wheeled, motorcycle-powered car was intended to be manufactured and sold to gearheads who already own a motorcycle. After insurmountable setbacks, what is left of the Phantom Vehicle Company sits here on a quiet driveway in Fountain Hills, but its history and that of its owner still live on.

The Phantom is a three-wheeled luxury sports vehicle, powered by one of the first ever produced Honda Gold Wing motorcycles, capable of 50 mpg and a top speed of 130 mph. It is equipped with the Gold Wing’s 5-speed transmission and a canopy door that lifts the steering wheel, digital instruments and stereo upwards towards the sky.

Part sting ray and part futuristic sports car, the Phantom was built with fibre-reinforced plastic filled with 6 lbs. of density urethane foam for rigidity, speed and lightweight construction, similar to the construction of a surfboard.

For Will, building the Phantom was a lifelong achievement, but how he came to conceive of its design began when he was just a kid.

At a young age, Will cultivated a love for design and aesthetics from his mother and uncle who were both artists. He was introduced to the use of vellum, a parchment used to trace layers of design, which his uncle employed to perfection.

Will’s love for cars came from his father who would often take him to car shows. At the age of 10, Will’s father took him to the Chicago Auto Show, the largest auto show in the nation.

Among the vehicles and festivities in Chicago sat a large, enclosed display case with small holes to peek inside with words that read, “Look into the Future.”

“I thought it was a time machine,” Will said. “I’m 10 years old, what do I know? So, I looked into the future. I was just dazzled.”

Enclosed was a 1952 Nash Healy, a vehicle that hit Hollywood with a force, spotted in classic films like 1954’s crime drama “The Fast and the Furious,” 1955’s film noir “The Desperate Hours” and the hit 1950’s TV series “Adventures of Superman” driven by Clark Kent himself (George Reeves).

At the time, Will would have never dreamed that his Phantom would be shown at the Chicago Auto Show decades later, and even star in a Hollywood commercial with Bob Hope.

As a teenager, Will built soap box derby racecars, winning the 1958 Soapbox Derby amateur racing event in Michigan City, Ind. Following that year, from the ages of 16 to 18, Will spent his days and nights in the garage, building model car designs for the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, racking up blue ribbons, which ultimately landed him his dream job on the design team at General Motors.

Working as a GM designer, Will still found the time to enter contests, winning a custom division with his three-wheel, 1/8 scale Phantom design.

Hard at work in the design studio, Will was assigned to a project with Chevrolet engineering to experiment with a car whose entire body/chassis was made of plastic. Will’s lightbulb went on and thought his Phantom design could benefit from the same fiberglass concept. The Phantom began to take shape and Will was eager to cover ground.

“The car has a wing-like shape and I was worried that it was going to fly,” Will explained. His roommate at the time happened to work at the GM wind tunnel, offering Will after-hours access to test his design in a controlled simulation.

Using a model Phantom at 3/8 scale, Will was able to test for proper radiator cooling and wind resistance at high speeds.

The wind tunnel model was made from clay so that if problems arose at high speeds, changes could be incorporated instantly by shaping the clay to precise dimensions. The tunnel test produced favorable results at windspeeds of 120 MPH. Most importantly, the Phantom did not fly away.

“The lure of possibly starting my own little car company became bigger than staying at GM Styling,” wrote Will in an archived online blog post.

After sharing their vision for the Phantom, Will and his brother Lee, who had been helping his brother since conception, decided to quit their jobs to pursue their joint venture.

“I quit my job, sold everything, got married all at the same time,” Will said, who also bought a duplex in California with his wife, Pat, where he devoted all his time developing the Phantom.

Supported by their wives, the two brothers along with other early partners tinkered with design, evolving from the Phantom’s side-by-side seater to a Jet Fighter for the Street design, incorporating a tube frame construction with a front and back seat.

“We realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew,” Will wrote. “At this point, we were all out of money and I had to find a real job. Subaru.”

Will was introduced to Subaru serendipitously at a time when he was sorely in need of work. The U.S. Government was testing the road safety of three-wheeled vehicles, and Will along with his three-wheeled creation was asked to participate.

On the space shuttle landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, Calif., the Phantom passed with flying colors, generating more cornering G-forces than many four-wheel cars. Impressed with its results, Subaru asked Will to come work for them.

Will joined Subaru, first working on accessories, then product planning and finally made his way back onto the design team, where he was tasked with designing the original Subaru Outback.

“That was my five-minute claim to fame,” Will said.

Back at GM, the plastic car concept that Will first got the idea to imitate was the Chevrolet XP-898, a car that was never produced in mass, packed away somewhere inside Chevrolet engineering.

Call it a coincidence or a harbinger of things to come, the XP-898 and the Turbo Phantom are linked by design as plastic conceptions that never found their potential.

For years, the Phantom sat idle, collecting dust and finally making its way to Fountain Hills where Will and his wife have lived since 2006. It has received international acclaim through car publications from California to Japan and car shows across the nation.

After placing in the top five in the Hot Wheels Legends Tour in Phoenix last month, Will plans to enter the Phantom into the upcoming Concourse in the Hills car show in Fountain Hills.

“I’d do it again, but I wouldn’t do that car. ‘Cause you gotta do something that’s within your range of what you can really do,” Will reflects.

Nearing 50 years since its original design, the Phantom is a tangible memory of a life spent chasing a dream at full speed into the desert.

“We could have been in business with a simpler model,” Will said, “But it’s fun having this one.”