Twin-engined Mini below and an interesting engineering exercise as it seems he turned the rear engine gearbox around 180 degrees so that the Mini still has back seats. That gave him 4 reverse and 1 slow forward gear. To get around that problem he modified the rear engine so it would run in the opposite direction....
Quote:
"And there’s a whole new can of worms. The biggest problem was that when you spin the motor backwards, the con-rods suddenly – because of the different timing – clobber the camshaft lobes (the camshaft also has to be reground as a mirror image of the standard one). The fix was to find a set of con-rods with a thinner section. Cheap and it worked. But I also had to reverse the oil-pump plumbing, cobble up an electric water pump with a reversed impeller and the ignition is crank-trigger. To get the engine to physically fit, I had to push the rear firewall and rear seat forward a few millimetres; not much, and then everything more or less dropped into place."
And the cross flow head put the carbies to the rear of the car, assisting retain the rear seat.
And then there is the gear change - another inovative solution.
