THE BUILD

Zcars Mini, The New Project

Ruth's comments

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If you have visited my Tiger website you will know that the Lotus Se7en replica has been sold to make way for something new.

The new project is a bike engined mini.

** click the car to see more pictures **

Why get rid of the Tiger?

The Tiger was a lot fun, but didn’t fit well with how I used the car. The Tiger was great on smooth roads and at trackdays but had some faults:

• It had very little ground clearance, so taking onto minor roads risked grounding the sump on any bump. (I only did it once!)
• It was fun on a track day, but had under steer issues.
• It was not at all weather proof, so winter and/or wet driving was, well, lets stay challenging. (I remember leaving home in the sun and driving into HAIL)

Some, if not all, of these issues could be rectified (The british weather can’t), but I enjoyed the building phase and fancied the idea of another build (He also wanted to start before I started talking babies).

Why not another Se7en?

I did consider this, but the bad weather driving was a big issue. My other love is cycling, so in the summer I do something like 100 to 150miles a week training and race 2 or 3 times a week. This doesn’t leave a huge amount of time for blatting about in sports cars. So time wise Autumn and Winter are better. I enjoyed taking the Tiger the scenic route to work, over the Yorkshire Wolds but the run to work and back requires the weather to be settled. In 2003 this was OK, the UK had a very good summer and I went to work once or twice a week in the Tiger, but 2004 was a wash out which kept the Tiger at home. One answer would have been to build a Se7en with a hood and full screen, but I never like the look of them.

Why a bike engined Mini?

I saw an article in one of the specialist car magazines reviewing a Turbo’ed Hayabusa powered mini developed by Zcars and Holeshot. It looked a hoot. Fast, very fast, looked understated, handled well. A look on the web at Zcars website found that the a Yamaha R1 powered version was a sensible price and gave about the same power to weight ratio as my Tiger. It seemed to tick all the boxes so the tiger went up for sale.

The Test Drive

The Tiger sold, so I arranged a visit to Zcars. Chris Allanson, the proprietor, gave me a demo of the car around the local lanes near Hornsea. What a cracking little car! It had that “shove in the back” acceleration, it handling like a go-kart, it screamed and screamed with all those revs. I was sold :-) Chris showed me some of the other projects on the go, a turbo ‘busa engined Elise and a twin turbo’ed 4WD Ulitma… nice if you have very deep pockets, a little beyond my budget.

The Donor

This proved a lot more difficult that I expected. Minis are becoming sort after and people are paying silly money for scrap. After looking at some rubbish I eventually spotted a Mini in the local newspaper, £600 bought me a fairly tidy 1988 Mini City. It wasn’t perfect, but it was solid in the right places for my purposes. It had a knackered synchro on second gear, but I was binning the engine and box anyway.

One the road…. Follow the link to find out more J

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