A mate and I jokingly talked about building a mental car on the cheap to have a laugh in, those jokes turned into serious conversations and this was born.....

To avoid having to fabricate or butcher some front engine RWD suspension, steering rack etc we set about finding a chassis with it all done so we can drop a Ka body on top, along with a complete Scimitar we picked up a separate chassis which was near enough the same wheelbase as the Ka

We found the scimitar is actually mid-engined, the engine sits behind the front suspension which will keep the running gear weight towards the middle of the car





We then bought a ka for the donor shell


.. then set about stripping it


and cutting it to pieces








We kept the A and B pillar for a good strong cabin and to retain the front glass and original door apertures


The front wings and headlights will be bolted to tabs to keep the weight down and the rear will be a clamshell which we'll be able to remove to work on the car if necessary


The entire cabin floor is now removed






Dashboard test fitted to see bulkhead/engine clearance


You can see the wheelbase is very similar


During the build my mate Screech has been designing the cage which is very very important to us as we're planning for a maximum of 650kg and somewhere in excess of 400bhp for the first cut, this is the mk1 model/design which has had pretty much everything changed





Even though Screech is running some FEA analysis it still held up to a real test albeit to scale




And now the pièce de résistance, a couple of weeks ago we picked up a BMW 4.0 v8 engine as found in a 740, produces 290bhp out of the box and should take a few pounds of boost to get us going!








The engine choice came down to space and weight, we did size up the 302 ford but its about 6" longer than the bmw lump pretty much excluding its use, it would sit the centre of the engine under the front of the windscreen and remember there either carbed or serious money, so the carb would require a cut out in the actual windscreen.
the fuel injected versions have much higher sump to top heigh and would need cut outs in the glass for the cam covers.
either way there would be no wipers and a bulk head mid way down the car meaning the driver would be situated behind the b pillar and thus the car becomes illegal again.

Then theres the weight, the in order to get the ford block light enough we would need alu head (cast standard) at about £400 a pair! then there's the issue of the ford block still having a steel g box and block.

Fritz on the other hand builds 300hp 4 litre motors that are fuel injected, so have inlets at the front of the v, are 6" shorter than the ford block and are only 24" heigh, meaning we have enough room to fit the motor in and still keep the floor to roof height under 1.5m (4.9 foot in old money and possibly lower as its at that now with no load on the sus).

The BMW block was one of the first engines to use CAD to produce a smaller lighter package, it really is quite small for what it is, and complete with gearbox it weighs what the ford block dose on its own.

There's also a serious lack of ford small blocks in this country, we spent the entire time since the conception of the project looking at the ford small block, and a good amount of time looking for one, bottom line, if you can find a fuel injected ford engine with good bores, alu heads, and a manual box in this country for the price we paid for the bmw engine then ill happily give you double that for it.

This engine choice has been in the works for 6 months (thing have been considered that you wouldnt believe, from pajero 3.0 engines to jag 4.0 diesel v8s, at one point it nearly ended up with a twin turbo 3.0 v6, the key goal was the package space and the power output) and is in many ways a serious compromise due to the factors listed above, put simply the ford block would have been nice, but in order to do that we would have had to compromise the total package of the car just for an engine, and that was something we were not prepared to do.

We have a lot of work ahead of us but we should make some good progress in the next couple of months