Building A Cosworth Powered Kit Car

Chassis Preparation

In September 2000, I collected all three packs from Quantum in Stourbridge and now had the chassis in my garage on the purpose made tressels ready for the build to start.

The first immediate thing you notice about the chassis is the quality of its construction and how much it looks like a speed boat.

The second thing I noticed was the amount of work I had ahead of me. It quickly become apparent that the build manual was only going to be used as a reference as pretty much everything I was intended to do was breaking away from the standard build.........oh dear.......development, even more time in the garage.

The first job was cleaning up the roll bar. The roll bar is the only item on the chassis which was not made of Stainless Steel and is made from cold drawn mild steel. This I am told is so the car could be eligible for the 750MC series. It would have been nice to have had the option of a Stainless roll bar (I am told now that the Xtreme now comes with a Stainless Steel Roll Bar). Once the roll bar had been cleaned up, the surrounding area around the roll bar was masked off and the roll bar was sprayed Satin Black to go with the blue and black theme of the car.

Other than masking every surface which will be visible at completion and generally cleaning the chassis, little else needed to be done to the chassis itself. So Lets get on with the build.

The first part of build loosely followed the build manual. The heater and fan assembly from a Sierra is fitted to the supplied heater box which is then slotted above the transmission tunnel but under the metal scuttle of the car.

The build manual talks about assembling the pedal box next. Well as I want a pedal box with a balance bar which I have no clue how I am going to implement and I realised the pedal box can be fitted anytime, I skipped this section until I have a better idea of how to do this.