Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Kids Are Alright: 21-Year-Old Alex Kelsey’s Homebuilt Rally Car Is Wonderful [Video]

Alex Kelsey/Kelsey Racing MC2

So the Kiwi telecaster is a bit misinformed. He says, "No supercar on earth can take off this quickly. Zero to two-hundred in seven seconds." Admittedly, if he was referring to the last generation of ultra-exotic specials from Ferrari and Porsche, he'd be bang on. But the McLaren P1, Ferrari LaFerrari, and Porsche 918 are all clustered right around seven seconds to 200 kph (124 mph). Of course, the builders of those three cars all have a bare minimum of five decades of motorsport experience in their storied pasts.

Alex Kelsey's only been alive for 21 years, yet his Peugeot-bodied rally car is capable of the same sort of accelerative feat. The Renault-powered MC2 (short for Mad Creation 2) was built in his garage in Coromandel, a small town on the North Island of New Zealand. Parts scavenging was the name of the game here. The wheels are obsolete units from Ford's WRC team. The brakes? Leftovers from Subaru's WRC effort. The interior fan is a ducted unit more commonly used to power radio-controlled planes. But it's no janky hodgepodge; the whole machine's shot through with professional seriousness.



And as a New Zealand-built vehicle, the car's apparently road legal, which might be the most ludicrously wonderful thing about it. Kelsey plans to campaign his tube-chassis marvel this summer. We like to think that his fellow countryman Bruce McLaren would be impressed.



from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27

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