home-built rear-engine roadster with a Northstar v8 on eBay

[quixote]

I work nights, & was up at 3am... so I went wandering through the freak-show that is kit-cars, listed on eBay.  I was kind of amazed to find: this.

It's obviously the Fiero treatment.  Beside the engine, the oddball bodywork kind of fascinates me --in a car wreck way.  It looks like they've married a rear-end from a pre-stingray corvette, to some kind of Porche front fenders, & stretched the hood and bumper to make it wider.  

I don't mind the rear, besides the fact that the transition between the married panels is missing something, the look of the front really just annoys me.  I guess he wanted a rear engine early Corvette.  At first, I thought: "this dude is just nuts," but then I saw: 2007 Lucra LC 470 and 2012 Replica Lotus Seven Caterham.   Now, I'm kind of thinking he's kind of a genius, with poor taste or small ability in body-work.  Maybe Corvette and Porche are the cheapest body panels he could find?

Ironically, I like the the Lucra front end, even though the whole car seems like a low-rent Viper knockoff.  I'm thinking that the Northstar roads$ter could have been a "home run" with me, if it had those Lucra front fenders, bumper, and hood --with the "power bulge" take out.  But of course, a rear engine car wouldn't need nearly as long of a hood... who knows, maybe it'd look even worse?

There's no way I'd fork over $20k to a random dude in New Mexico, but I'm kind of curious what people here think of it?  (Or the others?)

I actually admire that Caterham, but I think that Seller has a serious mental disorder... He drives it on the street --for years (probably very rarely)-- without proper registration?!  8/  He also about the the specially balanced motorcycle engine, then shows no pictures of the engine compartment, at all. 

(FYI, I'm not giving $39k for a bad Viper knockoff or $14k to a Lunatic, either.  I am also completelly unaffiliated with any of the above Sellers, car builders, or eBay.)

[tigger]

Hey quixote, your northstar roadster link is a loopback to this page.

If it's the one I found, it is a Porsche 550 Spyder fiberglass body. The rear had to be modified to accept the size of the 4.6L/4T80E. The "intake ducts" allow more airflow for the radiator and air box.

And yeah, it wouldn't be my first choice either, haha!

[quixote]

May 23, 2019 13:43:28 GMT -6 tigger said:

Hey quixote , your northstar roadster link is a loopback to this page.

If it's the one I found, it is a Porsche 550 Spyder fiberglass body. The rear had to be modified to accept the size of the 4.6L/4T80E. The "intake ducts" allow more airflow for the radiator and air box.

And yeah, it wouldn't be my first choice either, haha!

...Sorry about that.  Cut/paste error ---now fixed.

Only 45 minutes left, if you are wanting to bid.

I recognize them as ducts, I just was not impressed with the look of them.  From the images of the 550 that Google is giving me, you are correct, but they also changed the ducts.  (It looks like a kit of the car that James Dean died in.)

Finding that the body is a full kit, does not improve my opinion of it.  It explains why the suspension geometry & the engine compartment are so tight, though... If I was doing my own "money is no object, Northstar hot rod build," the engine compartment would be larger, so every component failure doesn't require removing the engine.  The kit cars I have previously seen like this, use a VW engine or a Subaru boxer.  (I guess that's assuming they don't have the cash for a genuine Porche engine.)

[tigger]

Yeah, the 550 Spyder was James Dean's "little bastard".

[Marc]

May 23, 2019 23:36:47 GMT -6 tigger said:

Yeah, the 550 Spyder was James Dean's "little bastard".

I thought that everyone might like to know how that nickname came to be.......James Dean was a good friend of Bill Hickman, a stuntman who portrayed the wheelman who drove the Charger R/T in the chase scene in "Bullitt" (my favorite movie, BTW). James Dean, 5'8", would call Hickman, 6'5", the "big bastard". Hickman would then refer to Dean as the "little bastard". And so the 550 Spyder also got the same nickname. It was extraordinarily small by 1950s standards.

[quixote]

I had not heard the story behind the name... but my mother was a huge fan of old movies, & I have a crazy recollection for trivia (usually, the more useless, the better). That's why I remember that the reason Dean had the Porsche, is because he got tired of waiting for his Shelby Cobra. (Although I don't remember if he was still on the waiting list, or if he'd had his name taken off, when he died.)

... It's like I know that Bill Cosby took his Cobra back to Shelby, because it scared him --& then he was proved right-- because the next owner of that car crashed it, died.

European cars were a lot smaller than American cars, after World War II. I'm not really sure why, except maybe that Americans were spending much more time at highway speed, and American companies were producing more cars of any given model --& so didn't need as much profit from a single car.

I don't know why the lines of that kit car bother me so much. The shape between the front and the rear wheels just looks way off, to me. White and other light colors always seem to be the best for showing off the lines of a car. I really did think it was a marriage of two different sets of styling, like that Lucra.