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Mid/rear engined 900s

2K views 16 replies 10 participants last post by  912 fanatic 
#1 ·
I've heard people mention that they've seen/heard talk of 900's with the engine transplanted into the rear.

Does anyone have any links/pictures/any further details at all?

A pub debate needs settling...
 
#5 ·
i'd say that car is a turbo. original boost gauge is still in there and i think that's an intercooler on the left of the engine bay. the large rusty thing on the right looks like the exhaust header for a turbo as well.
 
#6 ·
Rear Engine? Is that the best you can do?

Back in the days when I used to read Max Power (yes, I know ;oops:) they had a feature on a front and rear engined car, ie. one car - two engines. :eek: One was in the front as usual and drove the front wheels, the other was in the back and ran the rears. He had a crazy set up for joining the clutches, accelerators and gear knobs to work off one set of controls. IIRC it was a Golf or a Corrado or something. Whatever it was it used VR6 engines.

Max Power isn't all bad. They did a feature on a C900 once.
 
#9 ·
alexis said:
they had a feature on a front and rear engined car, ie. one car - two engines.
This is exactly what the pub debate was about.

There've been a few bi-engined cars - probably most famous in recent history is the MTM TT BiMota - an Audi TT with a tuned 1.8T front and back - Evo magazine got it to crack 200mph on the German autobahn!

But there have also been a few others: Like this Pike's Peak Golf and this desert-crossing 2CV

VW even mucked around with a couple of factory specials, like this Scriocco

In Practical Performance Car a couple of months ago they featured a guy's home made twin-engined Alfa 156, and went into quite some detail about the problems he had to overcome.

I was arguing that the longditudinal layout of a c900 engine, and the gearbox location made it an ideal candidate for twin-engining. The hardest part (after you'd built some kind of spaceframe to hold the engine), would be the gear linkage - but I'm sure I'd read somewhere about one of these ice racer conversions drilling a hole through the front of the gearbox casing and extending the selector rod forward....
 
#10 ·
ive been driven around a track in twin engined - space frame chassised Mini Moke - now 2x 120bhp race spec engines in a 4wd car that weighed less than 500kgs was not actually an experience i would want to do again:eek:


0-60 was something like 2.5 seconds
 
#11 ·
Have been closely thinking about that one for a while now,and came to pretty much the same conclusions - except that you could just weld in an inside front clip at the rear - the mid-engined c900 ice racer of Vince Tong's mechanic (IIRC?) was built that way.

Only thing is it *will* need a lot of development to sort the handling as basically one would be out on their own on that front.

Still... :D:D:D

nefarious said:
This is exactly what the pub debate was about.

There've been a few bi-engined cars - probably most famous in recent history is the MTM TT BiMota - an Audi TT with a tuned 1.8T front and back - Evo magazine got it to crack 200mph on the German autobahn!

But there have also been a few others: Like this Pike's Peak Golf and this desert-crossing 2CV

VW even mucked around with a couple of factory specials, like this Scriocco

In Practical Performance Car a couple of months ago they featured a guy's home made twin-engined Alfa 156, and went into quite some detail about the problems he had to overcome.

I was arguing that the longditudinal layout of a c900 engine, and the gearbox location made it an ideal candidate for twin-engining. The hardest part (after you'd built some kind of spaceframe to hold the engine), would be the gear linkage - but I'm sure I'd read somewhere about one of these ice racer conversions drilling a hole through the front of the gearbox casing and extending the selector rod forward....
 
#12 ·
Eric van Spelde said:
Only thing is it *will* need a lot of development to sort the handling as basically one would be out on their own on that front.
Looking at a rear suspension set-up on one of those ice racers would be a pretty good start, although you'd want a less extreme version to account for the extra weight up front. If you were spaceframing the rear anyway, you could design the suspension mounts so there was a wide range of adjustability

IIRC on the Alfa I saw, they moved the top suspesion mounts quite a long way inboard, and used cut-down Alfasud front suspesion parts.
 
#13 ·
nefarious said:
If you were spaceframing the rear anyway, you could design the suspension mounts so there was a wide range of adjustability
Hmm, not sure why one would want to build a spaceframe. Nowt wrong with having an extra set of OE (front) double wishbones at the back, would probably give all the adjustability you'd want anyways.

Just take a blowtorch to the inside rear and weld in a front clip I'd say. That should take a lot of engineering questions away. :)
 
#15 ·
nefarious said:
What do you mean by "front clip"? subframe?
No, basically the whole front end (except outer wings) up to the firewall. That's the way the Canadian RWD ice racer (and one mid-engined 900 that was done by a Saab engineer back in the early '80s) has been built anyways.

Replicating the front suspension set up for the rear in a AWD variation on a FWD car isn't exactly new, anyways - it's what Audi did with the original Quattro.
 
#16 ·
I never did see Marty's ice racer cause I left Canada before he built it, but I am positive that Ove Hasselberg built his that way. Welding the front section into the rear made sense, suspenion wise and engine mounting wise. He even used a locked steering rack in the back so he could adjust rear toe easily. I believe there was an article about his car in one of the American mags, such as Motor Trend back in the late eighties or so. Iirc, he did have some issues with the handling, it tended to oversteer badly. :eek:

Glenn

Eric van Spelde said:
No, basically the whole front end (except outer wings) up to the firewall. That's the way the Canadian RWD ice racer (and one mid-engined 900 that was done by a Saab engineer back in the early '80s) has been built anyways.

Replicating the front suspension set up for the rear in a AWD variation on a FWD car isn't exactly new, anyways - it's what Audi did with the original Quattro.
 
#17 ·
yep that’s Claude Hutchings ice racer that car went from nothing to complete in 6 weeks. front spindles out of c900. breaks all the way around are form c900 but the suspension arms were designed of a computer program sent to a back woods fabricator how is a phenomenal aluminum welder and after 2 years on the ice the only thing to go wrong I believe was a apc box died and the case of the tranny cracked and lose of tranny caused the tranny to seize up.
 
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