Crystalmarie Marzocchi, owner of a 2004 Dodge SRT-4.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

NORTH PROVIDENCE If you missed the point of the pink-and-black 2004 Dodge SRT-4 that just went by, the license plate says it all: SPKPLG.

Crystalmarie Marzocchi is a live wire indeed and her striking car is the result of hours of work researching and drawing up the design, as well as stripping the car and painting it while completing an auto body course at the New England Institute of Technology.

Her achievement is all the more remarkable because last June she had a series of eye operations that went wrong. Finally, she went up to Boston for a couple of operations — in November and in June of this year — to put it right and her eyes are finally fine.

But she had to wear an eye patch for months, including the crucial time she was working on the car.

“I was nervous about painting the car,” she said. “I had no depth perception and no peripheral vision, which affected my ability to judge things in space.”

Such a disability might have dampened her enthusiasm for the project. But that is not the Crystalmarie way.

One of her professors, Manuel Couto, confirmed that teaching Marzocchi had been quite an experience. “We had our hands full with her,” he said, laughing. “She’s a loaded gun.”

“But she has a big heart and was very, very determined.”

“She always does what she puts her mind to,” said her mother Donna. “We are extremely proud of her.”

Or as Marzocchi herself said, “I won’t have anyone do what I can do myself.”

She said she did not particularly like the SRT-4 when she first saw it, but slowly came round. “It’s small, sporty and fast and it’s a Dodge,” she said, explaining that her family has always driven Dodge cars and trucks.

As she wrote in a recent e-mail, “I was going to leave it alone, but I’m really into Mopar muscle. I wanted a car that I designed and did myself, my own work of art.”

After much research, she decided to model her SRT-4 on the 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, a factory-built race car that was not only armed with 3 carburetors, fiberglass hood and spoiler and side exit exhaust, but adorned with truly far out graphics.

“The Barracudas were one of the greatest muscle cars ever made, and I wanted to bring back the ’Cuda flair on a new age ‘muscle car,’ my 2004 SRT-4,” she said in her e-mail.

Marzocchi said she chose 1970 Panther Pink AAR Cuda, “one of the lesser known H.I.P (High Impact) colors of the 1970s” and “one of the wildest colors to ever come out of a car manufacturer.”

“The color was beautiful, and perfect for what I was going for, but the flat black would prove to be the more difficult part,” she said in her email. “Making the hood flat black was no difficult feat at all, but mixing the black in with the rest of the body lines so that it "fit" with the way the ’Cudas looked was the hard part.”

She said she worked for seven straight weeks, sometimes for 10 hours a day, going as far as adding the AAR stripes down the side and a side exit exhaust system to complete the retro ’Cuda look.

Couto said he often discourages students from doing complete paint jobs because it involves an enormous amount of work, including taking the entire car apart. But he said Tarzocchi was not daunted, going as far as taking the glass and molding out of the doors.

“She is very, very smart and really knows her stuff,” he said. “She had a bad eye but was never discouraged. She really put her heart into it and ended up with a very nice show piece, a unique piece. We are very proud of what she did.”

Indeed, the car has already won two shows, a Cruisin’ Bruce Palmer show at Fort Adams in Newport last October and a show at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain in May, has been featured in a calendar and on the PantherPink.com website.

In the end, Marzocchi was satisfied that her “2004 SRT-4 had the nostalgic look of the infamous 1970 AA ’Cudas.”

And she said her work is confirmed when she gets thumbs up from other, often older, drivers who recognize the echoes of the 1970 Barracuda as she drives “Lucius” around.

As she wrote in her e-mail: “The best part of this entire project was taking the paint scheme from a beloved Mopar of the past and bringing it 34 years into the future. The thumbs up and compliments I get on this car are mostly from people who may … have owned a Barracuda and recognize the paint scheme.”

Hang on? Lucius?

Yes, that’s the car’s name, she said, from a spooky character in the spooky movie The Village. She said she named it Lucius because the powerful little car seemed to have a mind of its own from the moment she got it.

“When I first got the car, he didn’t want to hear it,” she said. “It was possessed.”

At the same time, she says she would like to up the horsepower to 400 from its current 300 – even though she claims to drive like a grandmother – and replace the “rubber bands” on her rear wheels with Magnum 500 wheels.

Marzocchi, 21, graduated high school in 2003 just after her 17th birthday and enrolled in the nursing program at Rhode Island College. But after 18 months, she decided to switch to the NEIT where she enrolled in the auto body program.

She graduated from the NEIT in May, but will not be going into auto body work after all because she has developed arthritis in her back – the possible result of someone driving into the back of her car the first day she had a driver’s license (“Welcome to the automotive world!”).

So she has given up the idea of a career that requires heavy lifting and has returned to her first line of study, nursing, and has transferred her RIC credits to the Surgical Tech program at NEIT.

“Actually, I want to work in the Medical Examiner’s office,” she said, adding that once she has a course in pre-med biology under her belt, she plans to do a graduate degree in pathology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Marzocchi lives with her parents in North Providence and has two brothers, Vinny, 20, a liberal arts student at CCRI, and Tyler, 7. She recently cut off her long black hair and mailed it to Locks of Love, an organization that makes wigs for children with cancer.

At the same time, she said she would always maintain a small shop at her home to work on cars, but it would a hobby rather than a business. And she has no plans to work on anything but her SRT-4, which she has no intention of selling.

“After all the blood, sweat and tears I put into that car, I could not rid of it,” she said.

There is no doubt that the car is the love of her life. During a recent conversation, Marzocchi kept looking over at her car with a mixture of pride and love. “It’s like my kid,” she said, adding, “My ex said I loved the car more than I loved him.”

Check out:

http://pantherpink.com/ nf007.htm

http://www.myspace.com/ lspsrt4