Italian design, Yamaha power, McLaren ingenuity
unique Fiat 500
created by the father of the legendary McLaren F1, Gordon Murray, is up for grabs in the
The little Macca-fettled 500 has had its original air-cooled 500cc motor replaced with a 350cc Yamaha quad bike engine, almost doubling the lightweight Fiat's power output to 32bhp.
The only chassis mods are lowered suspension (with adjustable Spax coils at the rear), and the original differential is retained, but has a purpose-built casing.
Hard to mark this 500 out as unique...
Inside, the only instrumentation is a full Pi data logging system, whose first home was a Le Mans racer and which has sensors for engine speed, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature and road speed.
But why such a sophisticated data-logging set-up?Well, back in the early 1990s, when Gordon Murray's T25 city car project was barely a glint in the South African designer's eye, Murray was working on a small city car project for McLaren. This fully restored 1971 500 was imported from Italy as a test mule for the project.
...until you look at the engine
It seems that the little 500 had a similar weight to the planned McLaren city car, and so Mclaren and Murray used it as part of their investigations into the ideal power to weight ratio for their city car.
Seller Simon Percival says that all the mechanical work was done by McLaren engineers, with all the precision and attention to detail that you'd expect of them.
Apparently, Murray took the one-off McLaren 500 with him when he and McLaren parted company, and the car ended up in the vendor's hands in 2006, having been bought from a colleague of Murray's.
If you're interested in buying intriguing McLaren-Fiat, follow the link below. But be warned - Percival wants £13,000 for the car, which is a fair whack for a 500...