Reddit reviews Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250 and Race It!, 2nd Ed.
We found 6 Reddit comments about Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250 and Race It!, 2nd Ed.. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Check out this book here
There is a community of diy Caterham/Lotus 7 clone builders here
They may not be rear engine like the atom, but there is much to be learned there.
I hope you've read Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250 and Race It! by Ron Champion The book is a bit dated, but the ideas are there. You may also find a copy of the book scanned online somewhere.
There are also online forums based around the book. I've found the UK forums have more active members than the US forums.
It doesn't need upgrades really. I used to track a Nissan Micra 1.1 (? long time ago). Throttle was on or off, hand brake was turn, none of this ESC nonsense :) Do what you have to do though mate. Life is a balancing act, but you will need a hobby. If you want something a bit more fun fuck I hate Reddit URL format
You'll never do it for 250 quid, get a pro welded chassis, but everythiing else is fine. I've driven a hyabysa powered one and it blew my mind.
The original Locost book claimed £250, which when reading it made a lot of fairly generous accounting lines, but it did feel like you could do it somewhat close to that if you were really patient and waited for super good deals.
I'm in the US. Current exchange rate puts it at $5600 = £3500. That would be super tight, but do-able. $8k US could get it done though. Tools and talent not included.
Just look and perform the same? That's do-able. Here's some inspiration to get you started:
http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Sports-Little-%C2%A3250/dp/1859606369
I think you'll be hard pressed to find actual detailed schematics.
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Rally-Car-Sourcebook-Competition/dp/085429984X
That book has a lot of pictures and diagrams of various racecars (both production based and formula style) and discussion about design considerations.
The To Win series by Carol Smith has some wisdom from a man who built a lot of formula cars, but it's mostly technical stuff - not straight up schematics.
The only resource I know of that has full schematics about how to build a car, is Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250 and Race It!, but that's to build a 1960 era Lotus 7. (If you want to check this out, I have a .PDF copy I might be able to upload, as the original is out of print - the book shouldn't cost 1/2 the price of the car they teach you to build IMO, lol).
A while back, I had the same dream - except not a Formula 1 car, just a homebrew of some sort.
To get "practice" at putting a car together, I taught myself a 3D CAD program called SolidEdge (similar to Solid Works, except there is a free academic version that's readily available to almost anyone). I looked everywhere for schematics of real race cars so I could attempt to model one before I started working on my own design. The best thing I could find was that Build Your Own Sports Car book.
Seems like nobody wants to give away their design secrets - even with 50 year old cars...
About 10 years ago a friend of mine got a book about Ferrari's ~2000 F1 car. I think the book cost $250. You could probably build a ~2000 Ferrari F1 car based on the photos and diagrams in that book, but you'd need an extremely well equipped shop to do it, and it would still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make the shell and suspension. I don't even remember what the book was called. I think it might be this one, but I'm not sure.