Riding a revamped Cobra, courtesy of good friends

Even beneath the industrial-sized glowing fluorescent shop lights, Paul Berg was completely in the dark.

Then chains clanked and a garage door rolled up in front of him Wednesday afternoon to reveal what 65 of Berg's family and friends had come to see: a newly built, freshly painted 1965 Cobra hot rod.

Whoops and cheers erupted.

After a quick look, the tall, slender Lehi man furrowed his brow in confusion, half-smiled and desperately turned to David Kirkham, owner of the classic car replicating shop Kirkham Motorsports.

"Is that mine?" he shouted over the crowd.

It was a fair question. The 2,200-pound speedster sitting before him didn't look anything like the car he had handed over to a charitable and ambitious team of amateur car enthusiasts to help him finish before he died of terminal cancer.

And it was April Fools' Day, after all.

He wiped tears from his brimming-full eyes to keep them from rolling down his bandaged and scar-ravaged jaw, which had been operated on 24 hours earlier to remove three more cancerous tumors.

Berg climbed in the glimmering two-seater, leaned back in the black leather and thumbed the ignition button that sent a thunderous belch through the monster's chromed, three-inch dual exhaust.

"Feels better than I thought," he yelled.

The Cobra didn't always sound as smooth and deep as a James Earl Jones growl.

The car's 400-horsepower piston power would hardly puff a poof two weeks ago, when a crew of mostly strangers came together and ambitiously committed to finish the partially completed race car in three weeks.

"We were going to give it our best shot," said Shane Turner, who had found out while home-teaching in his Lehi ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that Berg had been given between three and 24 months to live. "We just had to."

Turner made some calls. Mike Williams of Printer Recyclers turned his indoor shop into a warm, Cobra-building den, and the men went to work two weeks ago — about the same time Berg had nine tumors removed from his face.

The Deseret News this month published the story of Berg, who co-organized a nationally recognized Utah charity, Heart 2 Home Foundation, which remodeled homes for needy Utahns.

The Utah Cobra Club felt inspired and contacted world-known Cobra czar Kirkham, who has built more than 700 of the classic pavement eaters in the last 14 years in Provo.

"I didn't give them a choice," he said. "I just told them I'm taking the car."

Kirkham said he felt especially inspired to help because the day before, he had listened to syndicated radio host Glenn Beck at a rally in Utah.

"Beck said to go out there and be an American and serve someone," Kirkham remembered. "And I was already fed up with how the government was bailing everyone out.