MG ZR Track Car #buildthreads

My brother and I had done several track-days in our own cars, but the need to do more track-days was ever growing. We made the decision to build ourselves a track-car that was fun, cheap, easily repairable and could handle some abuse.

Paul Catterall

16 Feb 2016

Having plenty of experience owning and working on the 3 different MG ZR/Rover 25’s since I started driving it seemed a decent place to start

This build has been done on a relativley small budget compared to some other track-cars you see. Using mostly 2nd hand parts sourced from owners forums and parts donated off a couple of MG ZR’s I have owned previously at various points throughout this build!

So for £150 we picked ourselves up this beast!.
A Rover 25 with the 1.4 K-Series engine

Immediately the light-weighting began!

New wheels

Lightweight car and standard suspension gives some comedy ride height :D

Bigger brakes

Bucket seats

First Track-day… with a whole 105bhp

and then COILOVERS!!!! (at over 3x the cost of the car.. this was a big commitment!)

a little colour coding along with MG ZR sideskirs and front/rear bumpers

After a hunt for more power we managed to source a 160bhp engine out an MG ZR 160
Its the VVC K-Series loved by Lotus and Caterham drivers
(along with sub-frame, gearbox, driveshafts, exhaust, ECU and wiring loom)
a bit of a bargain for £400 for the lot.

Time for the fun part :)

After moving house the Track-car got a little bit of love:

After a year of being off the road the car was given a good clean and put in for the MOT to make it road-legal.

and then it was just a matter of track-days!!

The car handles brilliantly and is a proper hoot to drive. With intake and exhaust mods finished off with a remap the car makes a nice round 175bhp… which is fast enough to be fun…

The car has been parked up over winter. With an MOT booked in for Saturday :|

Comments

dont these have some common parts with hondas?

Not this model no :( the MG ZS is slightly larger and is based on the Rover 400 which was designed when Honda owned Rover so some parts (coilovers etc) are almost a straight swap. But not the ZR range

AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is brilliant. Very affordable too…
How many days did this project take?
If you don’t mind me asking too, how much did it cost?
Also, did you declare your mods to the insurance?

Many days. It was more of a gradual progression of tinkering at weekend than a full build. It was about 6 months from getting the car to doing the first trackday (on the standard engine). Then it was another 6 months before the engine swap.. Then I moved house.. off the road for a year :( finally did a few trackdays and it has been parked up for winter.

For cost I would say around £1200 to get it to how it is today (including buying the car)

Not including Consumables (tires/brake pads) insurance and the cost of trackdays. I don’t dare work that one out.

Mods were declared. I had a modified car policy from a broker.

I hate to admit that I was ZR hater then I started working for my buddy that builds a few of these ZR s for track days and race training and probably the cheapest way to have fun on the track and fast road car