Building an R1 Powered Seven: September 2010

Building an R1 Powered Seven

A few years ago I got it in my head to build a kit car. After months of searching I came across the Locost concept. In short, quite a few amateur hobbiests around the world have built their own Lotus 7 inspired cars from scratch, following plans available on a variety of Internet sites and published in a book by Ron Champion.

I started gathering parts and finally began building the chassis in July '05. In August '10 the car was titled, licensed and is now street legal. The following blog captures the progress of the build and driving experiences after completion.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

On the road with new shoes...

New wheels and tires arrived today. Here are some pictures of them installed on the car:

After the first autocross it was clear that the cheap Sumitomo's I was using weren't going to work for autocrossing if I had any intention of being competitive. I bought some used slicks, but only had one set of wheels. Now that I will be driving on the road in addition to autocrossing, I didn't want to have to remount tires for each event.

So after looking around for a reasonable set of used rims that I liked (with little success) I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new set of Kosei rims and tires from Tirerack.com. The tires should be better than the Sumitomo's, and now I can experiment with the slicks on my old 13" rims.