A couple years ago, a 24 Hours of LeMons racer and I talked about the potential to turn an old no-wing formula car into wicked hillclimb car with the addition of some LeMons-ingenuity aero and a cheap, boost-happy engine. It seemed like a unique idea at the time, but it turns out that other “creative garagineers” have also toyed with the idea. Leave it up to an Australian, however, to be the one to go out and do it. This is Warwick Hutchinson’s extremely modified 1992 Van Dieman RF92, which was at one time a classic Formula 3 chassis. The tubeframe is the only remaining F3 thing about it; the rest is all custom-built, including a home-built diffuser and an aftermarket carbon fiber front wing.
The piece de la resistance, however, is the Mazda 13B rotary engine with a Garret GT35R turbocharger throwing 20 pounds of boost at it. While the combination features an epic blow-off valve noise—always important with turbo cars—the shrieking 500-horsepower rotary clearly means business. The driver’s attempts to keep the nose pointed up the hill vaguely resemble an octopus-wrestling match, but the Van Dieman has never been binned, apparently. The driver is some kind of shoe to manage that feat.
If you’ve got time, the badass build is pretty well detailed on the car’s website and, if you’re the right kind of crazy, it appears to be up for sale.
Awesome noise!
But to call the first video a hill climb is stretching the point – that’s just a slightly tilted oval track. Not like the slippery slope of the second one though – powerslides and all…
hill climb? cool car but lame courses… they would barely make it as an amusement park GoKart course (and not even remotely close to a serious shifter/enduro kart course).