New £35K Brit Sports Car
Exige challenger planned from ex-McLaren designer
Jim Dowle was involved in the design, development and testing of both the F1 road car and the SLR and mostly worked for Gordon Murray.
He is now working on the design of his own car and hopes to have a running prototype in 18 months.
The car is being described as a competitor to the Lotus Exige and a number of engine options are being considered.
Mr Dowle tells PistonHeads that the car will have around 200bhp from a mid-mounted motor, and the whole thing will weigh 870kg.
The car is not being built for out-and-out straight line speed; the priority will be on making the car fun to drive.
He currently runs JJAD, an automotive design & prototyping business, from a unit in Chobham,
An important factor will be providing luggage space to make the car a useable GT.
Chassis construction will be aluminium/carbon composite and the price will be around £35k.
He has to think 'out of the box' to achieve a small 'GT' type car with good lugage space. If front engined is not what he wants then maybe some kind of uber compact power plant. (flat or rotatry maybe?)
Good way of throwing away a lot of money.
Should be around 700kg Max!
Boggy
I really think 700kg is an unrealistic figure on a car like this chap, if you read the article you will see it is aiming at a lightweight/affordable GT car not a lightweight stripped out one.
It will be nudging 300bhp/ton which is more than adequate.
While I wouldn't dream of suggesting Ye Olde MGF was a plausible benchmark in any other context it is/was a pretty impressive piece of packaging for a mid engined car. We've got one as a second car (in fact it's my 'daily driver') and both the amount and variety of things we've been able to put in the boot (to pick a few random examples, 2 small soft suitcases, a Fender Stratocaster Guitar in it's hard case, a large bail of peat and about a dozen middling sized plants) are quite astonishing, certainly luggage for 2 people for a week (a decent benchmark for something billing itself as a GT) is absolutely no problem.
Taking the old Rover K Series power unit (which made ~190 BHP in VHPD form without the aid of forced induction) as being representative in size for a modern 2 litre-ish, 200 BHP power plant (say the Toyota unit which replaced the K in the Elise/Exige?) and the dimensions of the F/TF as a ballpark for the dimensions of a lightweight compact 2 seater there's absolutely no reason why that shouldn't be attainable without recourse to exotic engine layouts.
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JG
Something in size and weight similar to the original CRX, the GTM Libra or the Prodrive P2 (which I so wish they'd made)
So if this is aiming for that market then "Ahhm Inn" (as opposed to "Ahmm Ooot"
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