In most cases, however, he was just expanding on someone else's ideas, taking them another step, as it were. Here are a couple of his cars:
This is the famous 'Double V8' - built on a Dodge chassis... Dodge Weapons Carrier chassis, that is... with truck wheels drilled for lightness (?). The two side valve Mercury V8s were coupled with a double-row chain, via a sprocket on the front of the rear engine and the rear of the front engine. It had 4-wheel independent suspension, and water cooled brakes. The latter came about via electric fuel pumps that came on when the brake pedal was depressed and showered the brake drums with aqua pura. Innovative, certainly, but he'd previously owned a car with two Essex engines joined the same way... built by someone else.
I've mentioned this one before, too. Powered by a Ford Zephyr inline 6, it has a Holden front crossmember bolted to a hollowed-out lump of steel that takes the place of the timing cover. At the rear of the engine there's a 6" steel pipe that bolts up over the clutch, and bolted to the other end of that is the Tempo Matador transaxle. Independent all round, power aided by the fat supercharger on the left, the driver hangs in a lightweight frame to the right, while a lightweight top body section lifts right off... as can be seen below:
These two pics show some of the components, particularly the tubular 'backbone'. Again, innovative, but not original. Norman's friend, Harold Clisby built a Douglas motorcycle-powered hillclimb car that had all the same attributes except the power and size. Clisby's however, never went hunting Cooper Climaxes.
