I have seen some photos of some of these little cars. They look very funky.

I understand that in the USA they run in a class as Formula 1000,and in Ireland as Formula 5. In the UK I am told that there are a few Championships for these little screamers.

Who can tell me more about them, who manufactures them, what they are like to drive, and how expensive they are, (or not), to run.

How does their performance compare to....Ummm..... lets say a Formula Ford?

Photo's would be good too

Thanks.....

Never heard of Formula 1000 but Legends Cars are relatively popular here in the U-S-A.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_car_racing

Formula BMW also uses motorcycle engines.

The only reason I've ever heard of Formula 1000 is because of one of the TOCA/Race Driver video games (I think it's the third edition). Fun little cars to drive in that game, but I have no idea if the handling is anywhere near what it is in real life.

FA (Formula Atlantic), FC (Formula Continental), FF (Formula Ford) and FV (Formula Vee) also. No they aren't.



You can check for yourself! http://vimeo.com/user527784/videos/sort:date

Eh? Last time I looked, at least FF and FV used auto engines (Ford and VW). Or did I miss a smiley?

This always cracks me up everytime I see it...

I want one!

Smart Hayabusa Rocket!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBDXiXMj9K4

No... it was me who have missed another look before copying-and-pasting some text.
FV uses VW Beetle, FF uses Honda Fit, FA uses Cossies and FC is powered by some Fords.


WTF?! Who would use an Hayabusa's engine for that!

add America - DSR Sports Racers and England - Formula Jedi 600 and 1000

You may be able to find lap times for Jedi's and compare them to FF's on English tracks.

American F500 using snowmobile engines and rubber block suspension, lap the same time as FF at most tracks.

There's Formula SAE. Oodles of different designs out there, pretty much all of them using bike engines of the single-cylinder (e.g. Yamaha WR450) or 4-cylinder (e.g. Honda CBR600RR) varieties, but there's other engines like the Aprilia SXV/RXV V-twin or even Briggs singles being used too. Nice open-ended rules lead to some very interesting concepts and interpretations.

Formula BMW uses a near-standard BMW K1200RS bike engine.

Dunno if you'd class it as an open-wheeler, but the Westfield Megabusa is a pretty popular bike-engined car with a Hyabusa engine in a Lotus 7-style chassis.

Again, not an open-wheeler, but the Radical SR3 and SR4 are quite popular, even to the stage of having their own one-make series.

There's a few in the US too... One example of a US DSR car is the Stohr F1000 (www.stohr.com). There's also some smaller non-open-wheel cars under development by Palatov Motorsport (www.dpcars.net - don't go there unless you have a whole day to trawl that awesome site!).

I found a fantastic looking car called a SPeads RM08. Looks like a smaller version of an F1 car. I have also found a car called a Leastone Formula 5. Not as good looking as the Speads or the stohr, but very cheap.

My appitite has been whetted. I want to know more now.

He should be on someone's F1 list!

Me too.
They have a new track complex going in fairly close to me, and I was looking at a Ralt FF for a car to leave out there, even the old ones are 15K plus, with lots of expensive go fast pieces to break, so those are out. These are looking far more reasonable. Now that Formula Atlantic has gone bust I was even thinking of one of those, but for a car that can't be raced they are horrendously priced. Had a track day out there where we thrashed around with my buds MB S500 and surprisingly we had enough room to push it to 140MPH on the straight, dunno if these rice burner engines will hit that, but I'll be scoping these out for sure.Forget the gym membership, for an old man like me working with a formula race car of some sort looks much more fun for a couple of hours a week, and less stinky too!

Hi ,
The race scene for bike engined race cars is quite big i have owned and raced a Jedi single seater with a GSXR 1000 engine in semsec single seater challenge (lydden hill) racing against FF1600 FF2000 F3 MARCH F2 great fun as a coMparison the Formula fords etc do not come anywhere near as fast as a bike engined car, i had had some good battles with some older F3 cars.
At the moment i have a speads race car with a k6 gsxr 1000 engine see also MONOPOSTO CLUB, SEMSEC, RGB,750 MC ,all run raceseries for bike engined cars
Some make of bike engined cars include Aztec,speads, jedi, stohr & AB performance, my speads is for sale at the moment.

There was a 1200 Yamaha? Clubman type car at a Sprint I was at on the weekend, possily Westfield, I did not look that hard. But very quick and simple. Was within a second of outright times for the day and probably only a couple of seconds slower around Mallala than a FF 1600. And i think it was registered!

I've done Formula BMW in rfactor a lot. It seems like a really good formula. Nice cars to drive.

Car pretty much looks like an F1 car too.

I think a season costs more than Palmer Audi though. I'm guessing you need 100k USD?

Motorcycle engined cars are great but you need to make sure they are properly engineered rather than simply dropped in to a chassis by a small maker. They can be prone to failure due to oil starvation especially since motorcycle engines aren't designed to take lateral G.

Another thing you might need to look out for is the noise at high revs, some circuits with noise restrictions will boot you off if you're not too careful.

That said, if they are properly sorted then since they are often lighter and more powerful than car engines they are great fun and can spice up the handling too.

Are you referring to Formula SAE? These are competing engineering schools. The cars are simulated on Live for Speed.

Performance is just above a 135 gearbox kart. About 100hp, 230kg.



Engine

The engine must be a four-stroke, Otto-cycle piston engine with a displacement no greater than 610cc. An air restrictor of circular cross-section must be fitted downstream of the throttle and upstream of any compressor, no greater than 20mm for gasoline engines or 19mm for ethanol-fueled engines. The restrictor keeps power levels below 100 hp in the vast majority of FSAE cars. Most commonly, production four-cylinder 600cc sport bike motors are used due to their availability and displacement, however many teams have also used smaller V-twin and single-cylinder engines. Though it is permitted, very rarely do teams build an engine from scratch, such as Western Washington University's 554cc V8 entry in 2001.

Suspension

The suspension is unrestricted save for safety regulations. Most teams opt for four-wheel independent suspension, almost universally double-wishbone. Active suspension is legal.

Aerodynamics

There are no regulations or requirements on aerodynamics. Most teams do not build aerodynamic packages as the speeds involved in FSAE competition rarely exceed 70 mph (110 km/h), and design judging tends to frown upon aerodynamic parts that do not have definite test data, usually in the form of wind tunnel testing or at least computational fluid dynamics analysis. Therefore most cars that do utilize aerodynamic downforce tend to develop their entire car around the aerodynamic package, including massive wings and undertrays. The benefit of a well-developed aerodynamic package is evident; depending on how fast the course is, the slowest aero-package cars sometimes run several seconds per lap faster than any of the non-aero cars. But, on windy days, at the drag strip, or especially in the fuel economy event, aero cars can suffer significantly.

see Wiki

Legends is a quite popular form of motorsports here in finland. The cars use Yamaha´s 1300 motor(before it was fj´s 1200). Even Kimi did try those some seven years ago. Here you can see the result http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48dHESjuJek

Then of course, there's this tasty bit of Canadian weaponry...




On fifth gear.

Or a turbo, if that isn't fast enough...




Hayabusa turbo.