I know this sounds crazy, but on a lunchbreak, I saw a Formula One race car in the stream of opposing traffic. Assuming the owner made it street legal, isn’t that a doggone shame and waste of a performance car? …Like castrating a stud?
Was it a good old-fashioned three martini lunch?
No joke, no joke! Maybe it was a home-made job, like a “kit car”? Maybe someone was quite handy in metal shop? After seeing a man living out of his (beat up) Delorian in Bear, DE…I think I’ve seen it all, now!
I guess it’s not technically impossible, but I’d say it’s awfully unlikely.
Are you familiar enough to be able to recognize a Formula One, or are you using that as a general term for an open wheeled race car? There are a number of race series that use open wheeled cars that look superficially similar (although you’re not very much more likely to see any of them on the street either). As you said, there are even kit cars that are open wheeled.
For example, the Ariel Atom.
Hey, Jinx, could it have been an Ariel Atom?
These things are like four-wheel motorcycles, small, super light-weight, extremely quick, and they superficially resemble open-wheel race cars although they have “cycle” fenders enclosing the wheels and are completely street-legal. They are built in England by the Ariel Motor Company and Brammo Motorsports is importing them to the U.S.
There’s a somewhat famous video clip floating around the Web of Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear magazine nailing the gas pedal in one. It accelerates so hard his face distorts like he’s in a rocket sled.
Great minds really do think alike, Santos!
I’m thinking it might have been an Ariel Atom.
Hey, wait. . . where is Bear, DE?? Anything fun there? I might add it to my list of places to visit. Sometime after Nenno, Italy.
This is what modern Formula One cars look like. Did it resemble these? (I didn’t think so.)
I think I’m safe in saying that there’s no way that a real F1 racecar could be made street legal, at least not according to my understanding of US laws and regulations. For instance, they don’t have lights of any kind, DOT approved bumpers, air bags, or any number of other things I believe are required by law. I also seriously doubt they could meet emissions requirements.
All that aside, a real F1 car would be incredibly impractical as a street car. For instance, it could not survive long in ordinary traffic. Unlike street cars, they do not have fans to assist in engine cooling, and will therefore quickly overheat if not kept moving at a fairly brisk clip. The engine would expire after a few minutes in stop-and-go traffic. Also, the engines are only designed to run for a few hours (at race pace) before being rebuilt, and the tires wear out in one or two hundred miles. So they’re not terribly practical as street cars. To say nothing of the fact that each one is worth many millions of dollars.
For all these reasons, I’m quite confident that you didn’t see a real F1 racecar, or a real open-wheel racecar of any type.
So what might you have seen? If you could describe it more carefully we might be able to figure it out. It would also be helpful to know where you saw it. To the best of my knowledge, the Ariel Atom, mentioned above, is not imported to the US. My guesses would include:
The Caterham or
The Lotus Super Seven, on which the Caterham is based. (Patrick McGoohan drove a Super Seven in The Prisoner.)
The Plymouth Prowler had a radical, open-wheel look.
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Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other street legal cars that an admitted non-fanatic would confuse with a racecar, but maybe someone else can. And if the OP will answer my questions, we might figure it out.
There’s a guy in some place like Wyoming who has a Sprint car that he drives on the streets. He’s put lights on it and it’s registered with the DMV using the VIN number of something like a Dodge Dart that he used to own (quasi-legal). I’ve heard that other folks have done something similar, but his is the only one I’ve ever seen anything on. (It was in a car mag about a decade or so ago.)
I know I’m reaching on this one, but could it possibly have some kind of a photo shoot?
I believe that some exceptions are made for bringing not-street-legal vehicles onto public roads for pics, movies, etc.
From the “feel” of your description, I suspect this is not the case, though.
See http://www.arielmotor.co.uk/04/frames.htm for a link to the US importer.
The importer’s site is the typical US artsy-fartsy site that is unusable without Flash, so I have no idea what it contains.
I have to say “no-no-no” to all the above suggestions that it was not a F1 car. I know cars makes and models pretty well. A Prowler, for one, is closer to a “hot rod” style, not F1. And, while the Ariel Atom is not a bad guess, it did not have the open-frame chassis. I must wager it was not an authentic F1, but some hobbyist’s handiwork.
Thanks for the thoughts, and if I see it tooling around town again, l’ll let you know! - Jinx
Jinx. This is getting monotonous. And boring.
Try to distinguish between questions that are important, contain a probably factual answer and thus belong in General Questions and some of the mindless, trivial musings that have come to your brain lately.
Moved to MPSIMS.
** samclem** General Questions Moderator
Are you near a major college? Formula SAE cars look just like smallish F1 cars. When I was working with the Rutgers FSAE team some years back, we would sometimes drive the car from the workshop to a test track on-road. Not street legal, weren’t supposed to do it, but it was only a few miles and any bit of test driving you can do in the weeks before the competition helps. And it’s the right time of year for that.
I agree with previous posters that it easily could have been a kit car, or “replicar”.
Also, here’s a company that makes “street legal” formula 1 cars:
http://formula1street.com/photos.html