Get into topgear by building a V8 Bug

thank you, thank you, the foreign vehicles from the 60s, 70s and 80s are a VW Beetle, but we also know that VW Beetles only had 40 horsepower, which is not exactly exciting, so to make it exciting we decided to put a V8 in it, which which cannot be done. a standard Beetle chassis, so to put a big V8 in it, a bold new chassis and if you're going to build a new chassis, build a new suspension and if you build a new suspension, put in bigger brakes and then put the V8 in big in the middle. of the car mounted in the middle, not in the rear like the original and then putting it through a six-speed transmission, this all makes sense in theory, but how do you actually go about

building

this vehicle and getting it to drive on the road?

When

building

a vehicle for a customer, one of the first steps, aside from building the chassis and everything else, is to get a good donor body. When we started this particular vehicle our painter had mentioned that there was a Beetle in his shop that he had been working on for a client, needless to say it was a standard Beetle, the vehicle itself was in very good condition, the Body was in good condition, Nick, because it had already had some work done and it also happened to be pretty close to color. that our American client requested once the car arrived at the workshop one of the first things to do is remove the body from the chassis, it is not a complicated process, in fact, the body of a beetle is attached to the chassis, but I no I don't know, 15 or 20 bolts, we remove the body and the chassis is pushed to the side, it is the perfect donor, but if you intend to put a big V8 in the rear, we have a space problem, if you can Imagine in a beetle where the back is.

The seat goes and that entire gas tank where the engine was in the rear, all of that is cut so that only almost the silhouette of the frame remains plus the four fenders. There are also some reinforcements that we put in again. There is some mild steel. work, there is some soldering, we change the board significantly, so there is a lot of prep work that we do before the body re-equips the spray painter and then he starts with all his work foreign foreign thank you foreign foreign thank you foreign foreign So we've already made a couple dozen of these chassis and we have them in stock, so we would assign one of those chassis to this particular project and then from our shop department we would start assigning the suspension and all the mechanical parts that we would go to the chassis at the same time while all that is happening we need to get an engine and in this particular case we found a 40 valve Audi engine and then a six speed manual gearbox and then we would order the clutch from the UK. the pressure plate flywheel, all the bits and pieces, so now everything is happening in the workshop, apart from everything I just mentioned, you need electricity, you need an ECU, you need a bunch of things and then in This particular project, we will be ordering two turbos, so those had to be sourced, so a lot of work is done in the shop before the body comes back to us.

The chassis itself is aluminum. It consists of approximately 38 panels that are laser cut and CNC bent. um 5082, which is a particular grade that's used a lot in shared construction and in gasoline tankers, that kind of thing we put all the components inside a template so that they fit within a tolerance of 0.1 millimeters between each other and in this template where it is ensured. It is then welded by an obviously qualified aluminum welder, the welding process takes on average 12 to 12 hours to complete and the preparation before welding requires approximately two days of work when we receive an order for a beetle, there is a bearded beetle.

It's a great list of options and we tried to meet what the customer requested, obviously to some extent, on this particular vehicle, they gave us a color specification which is a BMW charcoal color which we used, but then there were other interesting options that we always enjoy. what we are doing and that is the customer had asked for a roll cage inside the vehicle, we didn't want to put a full competition roll cage in the car because it would make it almost impossible for him to get in and out, so we have a standard roll cage as standard, it is made of chrome-moly, so it's incredibly strong and we had to figure out how we were going to build this anti-roll code so that we could have it on the chassis while we were testing and then be available.

I was able to put the body on top and it actually became a little tricky to get rid of the rolling codes. I had to move to the body and then the body and the rolling cart together had to be put back on the chassis, other than that, um, the particular vehicle. It has Halle brand wheels front and rear with a 12 and a half inch wide tire in the rear and an eight and a half inch wide tire in the front. The request was for two turbochargers which have their own complications, one is not limited to just Turbo charges. in an engine you have to lower the compression of the engine and then you have to feed water to both turbos, feed oil to both turbos and it involves a pretty complicated exhaust system and integrate an intercooler into the orders, um, so yeah, it was a little challenging, but it's over.

To consider it a very exciting vehicle, there are quite a few steps when we build the exhaust system, we have to have the body on the car because we have to see where the exhausts are going to clear, especially now with the two turbochargers and then we wanted the two pipes coming out of the center of the body, so that there is a point at which the body continues. WE design the exhaust system while the body is on, we look for other electrical routes to link the lights, all that kind of stuff where the body comes back out. then we remove the body we can drive the car we can test the car we can do all the, let's call it the dirty work of looking for oil leaks, water temperatures, all those kinds of things that we can do much more easily without the body, apart from the fact that That the body can be in our way is just safer because with everyone around the vehicle we could scrape somewhere a beautifully prepared body, so we just leave the body out and do all our testing when we're happy that everything is 100%. hundred, only then do we do it.

We start putting the feet on the body, um, and the upholstery, the carpets and all that kind of stuff, once the car is assembled, including the body, we get to the most complicated and most stressful part, and that is tearing it down. to the dyno and drive the car hard, we can't do that kind of testing and setup on our roads, it just doesn't make sense and it's very dangerous, so we take it to the dyno, which means it's rolling. Highway means that you can make the vehicle go through all the scenarios that it would go through on the highway.

You have a huge fan blowing air towards the front of the car, as would have happened if you were driving on the road, so this air crosses the road. radiator and then we drove it through the gears and we did all the testing when we did the power runs, we did them in fourth gear, so to give you an idea, when we did the power run up to 6000 RPM in fourth gear, we already did it we have done. reaching 220 kilometers per hour, that explains why we can't do this on the highway once it is on the dyno and the car is actually driving, one can open the program in the ECU map and can adjust all the parameters which means fuel and air mixture, when does it change in the acceleration range at this RPM?

What should it be at that RPM? What should it be? How much do the injectors open and close? All these little things cannot be done on the road. So that's the real reason for being in the restaurant, obviously, at that moment we also look at the temperatures, the engine temperature, the sunny rise, the oil pressure drop and of course we are all left praying that the thing It didn't blow up, but Everything went very well, we got incredible numbers and we are very, very happy with the engine and transmission. We would always supply the car in what we call safe mode, so we won't take it to the extreme. we ran low boost, we ran 0.3 bar boost, we had fuel pressure at a realistic fuel pressure, we had the injectors using 60 of the duty cycle, so we're not really pushing the limits even in that scenario with the Rave limiter.

At just 6000 RPM, we were getting just under 300 kilowatts and about 480 Newton meters of torque. Once we get back from the dyno, we start final assembly, so on the dyno we don't have the fenders and stuff on the vehicle. therefore the fenders need to be re-attached and once they are on, the electrical systems can be wired up to all those lights. The final carpet goes on the final seats, which in this case are black Napa leather seats, door panels, door locks, glass, the glass on the interior. The car was not fully installed so there are some windows that need to be put in.

Window winder mechanisms. All the little finishing details make the Hooter work. It is the center of the steering wheel. All these small details are done with the vehicle in the workshop. With the final assembly completed, spend time polishing the car, put a good coat of polish on the body, as I always tell the guys, the last five or ten percent of the vehicle is 40 percent of the work. This is one of the many vehicles we build. but each vehicle has its own character its own time in the workshop um in test engineering we specialize in building bespoke vehicles and this is definitely a bespoke vehicle at the moment on the planet there is no other with this particular specification so no it's not another one with the 40 valve engine with two turbos with these rooms and we enjoy it, to be frank, we don't enjoy building one repetitive one after another exactly the same, so we really enjoy something unique and this is definitely a very exclusive vehicle, This particular vehicle has the Audi 4.2 V8.

We are very excited to now also offer the Chevy L with two and three completely different engine options than the Audi, but a completely new challenge for us in the shop, new chassis design, new. engine mounts, new exhaust, etc., but we are really looking forward to it on our next vehicle.