Cool old British Kit cars

Keith wrote: There are approximately one million prelit Westies in existence. At least, it seems that way. I think the reason the baby Radical Westie didn't do well is that Westfield seems to be pretty terrible at setting up a chassis. Every time they send a car to a magazine test, it's simply not ready. When they shipped the Miata-based car off to EVO for a test, they left the brake pads from the donor Miata in the car and didn't even bother to align it properly!

Yes I’ve seen that on the UK forums. Anything that looks vaguely like a real 7 is called a pre lit Westie to try and increase its value. Confusion is added because in used to be easy to keep the donor vehicles registration so it was hard to tell how old the car really is. Add in production changes over time at Westfield and the host of other replicas out there and I've seen multi page discussions on if a car is or isn't a Westie!

Keith wrote: An offshoot of the Westfield that didn't get a lot of attention: the FW400 (and friends). FW stood for Featherweight 400 kg, I believe. Carbon monocoque chassis. Some of the styling components became available as options on the more traditional Westfields.

I always thought that although FW did stand for Feather Weight, the 400 is the power to weight ratio of 400 bhp/tonne, that's a metric ton for those raised on non communist units. But I fairly sure you know about a million times more about Westies than me, something to do with you selling them and all! The engine was 190hp version of the famous 1.8L K series VHPD engine. It had a rear mounted Hewland transaxle.

Note how far above the roll bar the drivers head is. The UK doesn't seem to impose any sort of 2" rule on roll bars

It's quite possible the 400 means bhp/tonne. That would match up to the Caterham scheme. The FW predates our involvement with Westfields so I don't have any secret insider knowledge.

And yes, the brits have a very different approach to rollover protection. The standard rollover bar on a Westfield is barely strong enough to use for a push handle.

The only reason I specified that Westfield and GTM were owned by the same parent company is just to clarify: Westfield wasn't responsible for ending production of the Libra.