Upgrades

Part of my design activity involves planning for future upgrades. I've tried to minimise replacement of expensive parts.

Driver

Some more experience on track and a driver training day or two is definately on the cards. Whilst on the subject of the driver, a bit of weight-loss would do wonders to performance too. A 95Kg driver in a 420Kg car adds 23% more weight. Stick in a passenger as well and there is going to be a noticable drop in straight line acceleration. A timed run in Richard

's Striker showed a 0-100mph nearer to 9 seconds with me on-board.

Car Cover & Trailer

I can hire a trailer locally, for getting the car to/from track events but I see there will come a time, when I'll need to buy one. The default trailer for these sorts of cars seems to be by Brian James

. I'm also going to need a cover for transporting the car in poor weather. Specialised Car Covers

seem well regarded by Lotus owners I know.

Bodywork

At some later date I want to recess the rear lights into the bodywork and get the whole bodywork resprayed in a nicer colour. I'm going for a basic, primary blue gel-coat intially but, I'd prefer a metallic blue or purple final finish.

More Power

I'll be years saving up for any sort of engine replacement. If money was no object then this V8

looks rather interesting. It's a 2-litre V8 that weighs 74kg (excluding gearbox), yet develops 340bhp backed up by 190lb-ft of torque. And it's compact too, measuring 19in long, 19in high and 19in wide. I make that about 750bhp/tonne in my car. More than adequate :-)

Turbocharged R1

There seems to be several interesting sites on the web:

http://www.turbo-bike.net/
http://www.turbo-bike.com/Test%20vcd.mpg

Supercharged R1

Dynomite

sell a rather expensive supercharger for the R1, liberating a claimed 200bhp.

Brakes

The only planned upgrade is to replace the heavy Sierra calipers at the rear of the car with Hi-Spec rear calipers (with handbrake mechanism) as advertised on the The Kit Car Workshop

web site. This is only really going to improve the power to weight ratio though. If they come out in time to be fitted from day one, then I will see if my budget can accommodate them.