Porsche 550 Spyder

I'm sure I'll be writing about this for months to come, but now is a good time to share the first major milestone of a project I'm working on with a few good friends. This weekend Greg took the Porsche 550 replica we're working on to a kit car show in Pomona with it sitting on its own suspension as a rolling chassis.

This project all started with a bit of a crazy idea that a friend of a friend had to put a Porsche engine into a Porsche 550 fiberglass body with a kit car frame available from a company down in San Diego. If you're not familiar with the 550, you may remember it as James Dean's car fondly named "The Little Bastard". I came in to the Orange County shop where the frame was housed along with the built motor and had no idea what I was getting myself into. There sat a 3 inch side railed frame with a De Dion front end and enough rust to require a Tetanus shot if you looked at it close enough. In the coming months, this simple assembly and minor fabrication project turned into a massive build from scratch project involving welding, bead rolling, water jet cutting, machining, milling, turning, and a little bit of suspension and chassis design to fuel the fire. We couldn't just use a frame we bought from a kit car builder, we had to start from scratch to do the car justice.

With Greg as the vision, Matt set out building the engine and I began collaborating with the fabricator Josh to design and build the chassis and suspension.

The engine was chosen to be a 3.8L Porsche Carrera 993 air cooled motor and it was decided the Porsche 997 all aluminum suspension would be used. To make it work and fit in the 550 body we had to start from scratch making jigs for the 997 suspension and building a tube frame from scratch to hold everything together and act as the back bone of the car. In short, the car should be a 300+ HP car weighing less than 1800lbs. It has an inboard rear suspension and custom built everything including fuel tank, oil tank, frame, headers, steering column, and the list will only continue. Stay tuned for more updates in the future. Until then, here are a few shots of the car at the show this weekend.