Years ago when I was first looking into getting my Elise I spent quite a bit of time on the British Cars BBS, which at the time was a lively place to find out about such things. I remember have a couple of chats to a guy who went by the name of DP on the site. He had one of the few Elise’s in the states at that time, which was quite a feat as they weren’t actually street legal over there.
Anyway, last time I remember him posting there he was looking into building his own car from scratch based on a layout with the driver and engine side-by-side with chains driving both the front and rear wheels.
I kept up with the project at the time, but today I noticed a post on Jalopnik about a new ‘DP4 Super-kart’. Turns out in the 8 years since then Dennis has been busy building on those original plans and developing a number of different cars based on that layout.
The latest project looks pretty impressive… it’s smaller than an original Mini but powered by a ~200bhp motorbike engine though a 4wd system. If the video below is anything to go by it looks like a lot of fun. Especially when you consider that’s the cars first real run so it hasn’t had much development on it’s setup etc.
He’s also got a really good blog detailing the development of all his projects including the DP4. If you’re a car geek it’s well worth a read. It’ll be interesting to see how his other projects go, as they include electric track cars based on the same sort of designs.
There’s more info on the Palatov Motorsport site and DP’s own site.