(2) Why K series Midget?

I have owned a Lotus Elise for many years and had great fun on the road and track with the car. I recently started doing some European events with my Dad in his E-Type and they turned out to be great fun. Relatively cheap and full of great personalities. They often involved driving across Europe with close road hillclimbs and various trackdays included.

The ring in my Elise

Playing with Classic porsches, a bit of a cheat in a modern Elise!

A private French track in the E Type

I decided I wanted to build a car to do these events. The problem is that the car needs to be at least 25 years old, but reliable enough to stand 2500 hard miles, 6 or 7 tracks and various hillclimbs all in a week or so.

I decided that my budget would be around 10k and (with a tear in my eye) I sold the Elise and embarked on a search for a car.

Porsche were a favorite of the majority for these events and I looked very closely at a 924 Carrera GT, but couldn't find one that was good enough and cheap enough. I also like the idea of an Alfa GTV but in the end decided I wanted a softop and a Midget/Sprite just fitted the bill.

I knew that I would need to make some extensive modifications and wanted to try and locate a car that had at least some of the components already fitted that I wanted. I looked at lots of them and eventually decided that I was going to buy a sorted car and put a Rover K series engine in it. I knew the K series from my Lotus days and its a light, tunable unit that has the advantage of being very common and sourcing bits and spares would be very easy.

The engine itself started as a 1400cc unit, becoming 1600cc and eventually 1800cc. The 1800cc unit is found in lots of the Rover cars including the MG ZR and the MGF. Its also found in the Landrover Freelander and Lotus Elise.

I spent a long time looking at the MG Cars forum at http://www.british-cars.co.uk/ where there is a dedicated 16v Spite/Midget forum and this proved an invaluable resource while researching the build. From here I discovered that a company called Frontline Spridget produced a kit for fitting a K series into a Midget. So with the confidence that its been done before and that the web had lots of information on the subject I searched for the donor car.