2.0 liter high performance engine for Cobra kit car

[cmac2012]

I recently met an interesting fellow. We have a Sunday morning car meet up in the large parking lot behind a coffee shop in lovely downtown Orinda, CA.

I’ve only been to three of them, but I’ve seen some pretty wild cars already. At the second one, I saw what looked like a Cobra of some kind but slightly different. The hood was open, I took a look, I’m thinking that’s way too small for a 427. I look closer and it’s a double overhead cam six, and I saw the word Bristol in the casting.

Then it hit me, I was looking at an AC before there was a Cobra. The owner is a pretty good dude, very savvy. I told him I had thought about putting a BMW six in one of those, why would you want a 427 boat anchor upfront in a small car like that. He liked that idea.

The next week he showed up in a Ferrari mid-engine bad ass looking machine. He is apparently well fixed.

I’m thinking about suggesting that we actually try to build the smaller Factory Five Cobra knock off with a high-performance 2 L. Search indicates the dry weight on those things is about 2300 pounds.

The Honda K20C1 Crate Engine sounds like a hot four-cylinder: 306hp, torque 296 lb-ft.

I’m going with 2 L because then we could have the option of selling it to some racing team if we got tired of it or wanted to build something else.

One fantasy engine idea would be to somehow get a hold of the early BMW M20 inline 6, as seen in the fabled E30, of which I had two. Seems like if it was properly tuned you would get more punch out of six cylinders than a four with the same displacement. Might be pretty hard to get one of those engines however.

The Honda motor is $7000. Seems like a reasonable price. But I know next to nothing about racing I hate to tell you. I’m not sure if there is a non-turbo clause or what.

So far, I’m having trouble discovering if you really save all that much weight with the 2 L engine. Here are some figures I found, not sure how accurate they are:

K20C1: 403 lbs

BMW N20 4cyl: 307 lbs

Ford Coyote 5.0: 443 lbs

Ford 427: 675 lbs

Chevy LS1 293: 500 lbs