• Build a capable, fairly practical two seat sports car for around £4000. It should be quite fast, with a power to weight ratio around 200 bhp/ton and handle well with double wishbones all the way around, and it needs to look good.

1. Donor car will provide engine and electric's, as well as all sorts of odd bits, a Rover 2.7 V6 is favourite choice with it's sweet 177 bhp Honda motor. It is hard to find a manual version though I have managed it after a bit of searching. Also I found an auto with a lot of good bits on it including 16" wheels so I have two of everything. The engine is big and beautiful but the electronics around it make me think of an Italian telephone exchange in the 1970's, i.e. Excessively complicated and liable to cause headaches.
2. The engine will be used at the back of the car in a mid engine/rear wheel drive format. This will give a rear weight bias, which I will try to balance by putting as much else in front of the centre of gravity as possible, aiming for about 60% on the rear wheels. 60/40 is ideal but I think hard to get to this way. The hubs will have to be locked in the ahead position of course.
3. Chassis will be a sub-frame around the engine and space frame/backbone design in front of it. Rear suspension will be from the donor, double wishbones as standard, and modified Locost wishbones at the front, probably using Rover uprights and brakes. Alternatively I may use another set of Rover wishbones off the second donor car. Adjustable coil over shocks will provide the bounce
4. Practicality will come from a windscreen, possibly like that on the Kamala, and maybe a T-top roof. Doors of a vestigial nature will improve access.
5. To get to the target of 200 bhp/ton, the weight will need to be kept to 920 kg maximum. Body will be a mixture of fibre glass and aluminium sheet to help get to this, and all components will be designed as light as reasonably possible without spending a fortune on trick stuff over the counter. Working in the aircraft industry does give lots of good examples of how to build things light and strong (and bloody expensive!).
6. Styling will be a case of form following function, I will not fit over wide tyres because they look good, I want what will handle best. I do like the wild style of some exotic cars though and Lamborghini influences from the last thirty years might just creep in! Lights and windows from quite mundane cars can look trick in the right contexts, just look at the shape of headlamps on some super mini's for example.
7. Lastly, it has to have a name, so it will be, for the time being at least, the Vulpus V6. If you know any Latin you'll know what the badge will feature, don't you! Or you could just look at the top of the screen.

Above- this is us by the way, that's me on the right and Ro doing her Goth thing on the left. We are at a festival in these pics BTW, our garden is not that scruffy... or big. Big thanks to Ro- she backs me up on these daft projects of mine and doesn't moan whan I disappear out the garage for hours on end. And she will sometimes be found buried upside down in the footwell to assist trimming or holding a spanner while I am underneath (the car). One in a million.

Left is why progress on the Vulpes has been a little non existant for the last six months! There was a lot of garden work done too...Please note the cat ramp up to the catflap, my wife thinks it is too narrow- how wide is the track of an average cat dragging a half dead rabbit exactly.

   The observant among you will notice that the above forms a seven point plan. Inspiration for this came from the fine institution of Her Majesty's Government therefore we can expect the results to be protracted and quite possibly at complete odds with my original intentions. At one year into the project I have found that the Rover is an awful donor for anything but the engine, gearbox and related electronics. It is all too big, too heavy and usually rusty. I have also found that you can't nick bits of other designs if you want to do it properly, so everything on the Vulpes is bespoke to the car itself, i.e. no Locost wishbones. At two years in, I am thinking I won't take this on again, though I might try and do something simpler and use existing suspension and body work. At three years I really want to build something else, I fancy trying a late Twenties style limo based on a Beauford with two four pots coupled up to make a (nearly) straight eight. Or a Hovercraft. At four years along I think that this has all taken a lot too long and I just want to see the end of it, but sometimes I do look at the Vulpes and think it really does look pretty cool you know...I would never advise anyone to use a Rover for a donor vehicle in this context- it is just too complex in a wholly un-necassary way- any Ford or Vauxhall would be a better bet. As a Brit I was as sad as anyone to see Rover go to the wall, especially as those heathens at BNW had a large hand in it, but really if this was the best they could do reliability and production cost wise by the early nineties then they were asking for it way back then. That said, as I also love cars with a bit of character and the V6 800 was a nice car to drive and looked OK.

SITE LAST UPDATED 28th June 2008. (The end is in sight, but I still need a telescope to see it...)