The Background Story
When did it all start?
I've always had a vague interest in cars ever since I was young, I used to enjoy going to car shows, museums and watching car programs on TV. I'm not going to pretend that I'm a car nut or that I have any great knowledge about cars because I don't. I always wanted to have a cool looking sport car growing up and so now that I am... I started casually looking at cheap affordable sports car, as well as ridiculously expensive super cars and dreaming about which ones I would buy if I won the lottery. Anyway one day I came home from work and thought I'd have a look at sports cars again. I was curious to see how much it would cost to buy a factory built Caterham, £20k-£35k depending on the model. I'd heard of Westfield sports cars and I knew that they offered cars similar to the Caterham seven so I decided to check it. The price was £20k, while looking through the site I noticed that they had starter kits for £3.5k to build your own car. What interested me the most was that it required you to source the parts, like the engine, from a donor car such as a Mazda MX5 or a Ford Sierra.
What made me want to build a kit car?
The idea of building a sports car from bits off another car had never really dawned on me up until I came across the Westfield kit. I had always been amused that kits came with all the pieces. Luckily for me my brother had a MX5 (1994 Japanese import Eunos 1.8L) laying around, which sparked the idea of maybe turning it into a kit car. However I knew very little about kit cars and nothing about how to build one. But still I became fascinated with the possibility of having a cool looking kit car.
I began searching for kit cars that used the MX5 as I donor. I came across few that really interested me, one in particular, the MEV Exocet. The build process seemed really simple and something that I could manage to do without much know-how. Simply stripping the inside of the car, removing a few nuts and bolts then lifting the body to separate it from the sub-frames and the rest of the running gear. Then bolting a new chassis frame and bodywork onto the sub-frames and running gear and you'd have a fun little kit car. The Exocet kit was very tempting but I didn't like the idea of the cockpit being so exposed to the elements. This then lead me onto the Mevster, which looked amazing and much more enclosed from the weather. The build process was basically the same as the Exocet and seemed very straight forward. Again very tempting but for me it came down to price/commitment. Obviously because you get more car it was more expensive than the Exocet; at the time I didn't want invest the money in the kit that I may or may not finish. So I gave up for a while looking at different kits.
Eventually after a few weeks I went back to the classic image that comes to mind when I think of kit car, a Seven type looking car. I wanted to see if there were other kits similar to the one offered by Westfield. I came across the GBS Zero MX5 starter kit, with a price of £2.5k, which was great. However, again I didn't want to buy the kit and then get stuck half way through the build and never finish it. The kit involved a lot more work than the kits from MEV but I liked the look of the Seven car a lot more. I started researching all the work that would be involved in building the kit from youtube video's, blogs and forums. I'd heard of the Locost 7 and references to the book "Build your own sports car for as little as £250" by Ron Champion. I wanted to check it out so I went to the library and found the Haynes Roadster book instead "Build Your Own Sports Car: On a Budget" by Chris Gibbs. This marked an end to the journey for me, I'd found an extremely useful book with a basic build guide that I could use to build a MX5 kit car.
Why the Haynes Roadster?
I finally choose to build a Haynes Roadster, my second choice would have been the GBS Zero MX5, the main reason I chose the Haynes Roadster was the financial commitment. I didn't want to be tied down, with the Haynes Roadster I could buy bits as I went along and that way if at any time I changed my mind I wouldn't have that much money invested in the project. The other reasons being that there was detailed information online on adapting the original Haynes Roadster (based for a Sierra) to fit MX5 running gear, as well as a large community through forums should I get stuck. Lastly after reading the first chapter of the book "Skills Required" and flicking through the others it gave me the encouragement I needed to give it a shot.
The decision to build a kit car was a very slow process but I had finally decided to build a Haynes Roadster. However before making and buying any parts I had to see if the donor car that had been sitting for nearly 2 years would start...
