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Made a visit to kad today armed with what i thought was a big budget £10k to buy a singing all dancing 160 -180bhp engine with dog box etc . I left with the reality that i need another £8k to be in the kad club . Thats right £18k including the dreaded vat. Driving home i thought , yeh i can afford it but cant help thinking there must be some cheaper ways of getting this sort of power in a standard front mini . The mini im building is a mk1 , stripped out just to use on weekends and for track days . must be on 10 inch wheels , not mid engined . Has anyone ere tryed pro-motive R1 engine in a mini or honda integra b18 type r engine . Any thoughts appreciated

Turbo?

then you can get 160-180 hp with a fairly standard bottom end, and it'll happily potter to the shops.

KAD...so common....

Turbocharge it

Nice pics vegard. So would you recomend spending the money and are they all there cracked up to be . A freind of mine has a b18 type r in his mini and although the engine produces 220bhp even he feels his car lacks in the gearing department. he never uses 1st and second, and has to run on 13s . Thing is his conversion cost £6k

Personally I'd always go A series in a Mini. If you want 120+ hp in a road going Mini, you've got two choices. Both mentioned here. 16V or turbo.
A turbo works out LOTS cheaper and will be just as fast. However there are more gizmos to go wrong and adjust, but that will be mostly initially.

Wil H will elaborate

Vegard wrote:Personally I'd always go A series in a Mini. If you want 120+ hp in a road going Mini, you've got two choices.

ahem, or arden eight port......

guru_1071 wrote:

Vegard wrote:Personally I'd always go A series in a Mini. If you want 120+ hp in a road going Mini, you've got two choices.

ahem, or arden eight port......

Might be Rich, but with an SW5 camshaft?

Vegard wrote: Might be Rich, but with an SW5 camshaft?

verg

i didnt realise that KAD did a sw5 grind for their 16 valve head.......

Why not contact SC Components ? The 16v BMW K1200 head, coupled with injection and mapped ignition is a dream to drive and pulls like a train from 1700 to 7500 rpm !

Made 3 engines with them, very nice guys and good quality products. The power figures gave an average of 129bhp at the flywheel.

guru_1071 wrote:

Vegard wrote: Might be Rich, but with an SW5 camshaft?

verg

i didnt realise that KAD did a sw5 grind for their 16 valve head.......

What I meant is; Does the Arden produce 120hp with an SW5 camshaft
A KAD does produce 120hp with mild camshafts.

Vegard wrote:A KAD does produce 120hp with mild camshafts.

id like to see the engine dyno graph for that...........

The only sensible way to go for what you are looking for is Turboing.

Thanks for replys so far . Going to look into a pro-motive r1. Sounds good on paper, 165bhp . front wheel drive, 6 speed sequential box, fuel injection, now has a reverse gear , can use mini sus , brakes , driveshafts . easy to change diff ratios, can run on 10s, fits under bonnet . Relatively cheap , £4k for kit all in . Say £2k for a good r1 lump and bits and peices. Thing that maybe might be a issue is the lack of tourque at 80ft/lb . Looked at the kad dyno figures 120ft/lb . Maybe a test drive in one would help make my mind up .

It cost me about £4000 to turbocharge my car, I wouldn't describe the spec as modest but it is when compared with a lot of the cars on turbominis. It is probably good for at least 150hp with the turbo still being efficient which is probably all you need for the road. If you did want more power it is possible with the engine still being reliable and, as mentioned, you could always use a K head. It is still very drivable and the only compromises are the light flywheel and heavy clutch (and straight cut drop gears if you don't like the noise) but I'm sure that is a whole lot less compromise than a 180hp KAD engine would be for road use.

Friend of mine has K1200 RS 16V head on 1380 bottom end, 8900 cut out 146bhp at the fly 125 ft/lb. Amazing engine, full of character, screams a lovely song. We drove it to Rome in 2009, ran beautiful. We were told on full chat (with a 2.7 diff it's pulling hard at 130 on the sat nav with 2 k still to go) it sounded like a Spitfire (the plane!) coming past people. Cost approx £6 all new.

The same friend has a B16 and while having 160bhp etc etc it's got no soul, it's boring.

heres a couple of graphs that may help give a picture of what a 5 port can do ...





the first graph is a rr day on a superflow dyno at northampton , i consider to be fairly accurate .power is at crank ,the boost levels were 12 ,15 ,and 16 psi . note , no flow through intercooler , i estimate power being around 10 bhp more with a cool ic .




this graph is based on a rr day on a dynocom rr,where the losses measuring system was a bit erronous, so i simply took the power at the wheels and added the losses from the superflow dyno .. note the big boost spike making the power peak at 5700 where boost was 21 psi .. not at 6800 where boost was 17 psi .

this 1312cc engine uses stock :rods ,crank ,cam drive ,drop gears . omega cast pistons, ported head ,and custom cam . it returns 43 to the gallon normally .
i use around 5 psi normally thats around 130 bhp , then flick a switch to give me around 13psi for 175 bhp .,when racing i use 23 bhp spike and 19 psi across the line ,it does 13.26 quarter mile and 112 mph terminal speed , on falkens with an open diff .weight racing is 615 kg .


the bike engine thing is the lack of low down torque .. my engine makes over 100 lb/ft from 2800 rpm . this makes it a truely flexible engine .

biggest expense is a straight cut box .and a 4 pin diff . and no it doesnt have a remotely heavy clutch lol.

regards
robert

Mad mad mad mad mad.

I've just been over the pub with one of the blokes who was in the mini racing scene right back in the beginning. He recalls when British Vita started blowing more money on a cylinder head than he paid for his whole car (which had a race engine and subframe for racing and a road going one for going to work, CR was so high they had to tow start it).

You can have 8 ports and all sorts of weird 60's oddities, but the bottom line is that it's a mini. An old saloon car. For a fraction of the cost of your silly engine, you can have a car which will do 0-60 in under 4s and be competitive in sprints/hillclimbs (I have one in my garage).

Minis and the associated stuff has gone totally silly. I like minis and got a 66 Morris Cooper (with some wrong bits, but totally rust free) for £1500 in 2003. This was a sensible price. I then got a Longman 1430 engine which was run for 20 minutes and then stored for years and years and years for £560. Straight cut everything, all the right bits. £120 for 5 mag minilites in good condition and there you go.

With a big return to sense, it's realistically a £4k car at best, but I imagine some silly nutter would try and get £12k for it on ebay. Why? It's a mini!

Why oh why oh why do people spunk thousands upon thousands of pounds on a mini? We aren't in the 60's and we aren't building the fastest mini ever. Why pay KAD a total and utter fortune for something which would have never been found on a 60's mini so that it performs something like a more modern car?

I just don't understand it.

£10k on a mini engine. Jeez, you can almost get a "needs work" TVR tuscan racer for that money.

" in the shed " , excactly my thoughts . I can afford the kad full race engine and box but im struggling with justyfying it. I could do with a new work van and could buy a brand new ford transit sport van with every extra for less money . I could also buy a BMW MINICOOPER S for that money or put a couple of grand to it and buy a lotus exige . Thing is were all on this forum because we have a love of minis and theres plenty of poeple who will spend endless amounts . "probably me included". Im certanly gonna have a look at some other options before i make my mind up .

I think a lot of Mini enthusiasts enjoy the challenge of building the more extreme power A-Series Mini's or those with modern Vtec type power units but most projects seem to be for sale shortly after completion..........

I still enjoy reading about others efforts and innovations to build such Mini's but much as I love classic Mini's prefer to put my hard earned cash into something more suited for that kind of power, especially for practical and safe road use. But then maybe I am just getting old and too sensible!