I have owned Y10's ever since I started driving at 17. I am 21 now and I have owned other cars since my first Y10 including a mazda RX7, none of which have offered nearly as much fun as my Y10's. My fiat panda 4x4 was fun especially at 70mph across salisbury plane, but didnt quite offer the performance of the Y10 turbo.I own two Y10's at the moment, the first is a FWD 1049cc turbo (pictured above) which I am building a fuel injection system for. This car will be fairly standard apart from better suspension and slightly more power.
My other Y10 started life as a 999cc FIRE. It was my first car and a hand me down from my brother. It needed a bit of work after he had finished with it. He managed to bend the suspension crashing it up a kerb!
I resprayed the whole car and fixed the suspension. I drove it for about 3 months before I decided I needed more power. Third gear gave up so I though rather than replacing the gearbox on the standard 999cc engine I thought I would replace the whole lot (engine, gearbox, wiring loom) from a 1049cc Y10 turbo.
It took weeks out in the freezing cold getting the car together. I got there in the end though and the result was mad! I ran the car with an UNO IHI turbo charger with custom water cooling. It produced loads of power but never ran properly.I got home one night with the exhaust manifold glowing orange and the brake disks glowing cherry red. Not surprisingly I did not switch the engine off right away
After a couple of years the Y10 developed some electrical problems and the engine started to knock slightly.
I took it off the road and it waited out in the cold and rain for me and my friend Adam to find a workshop to keep it in.
We took this time to decide what we were going to do with it. The first idea was to put a 1.6delta hf turbo engine mid mounted with RWD. Then we thought the great thing about the Y10 is you can get 4 to 5 people and luggage in fairly easily.
I have had 7 people in one of my turbo's before and as much as the Y10 shape is versertile its not really built for it.
We wanted to make a small car which was easy to drive, seats four people and a small amount of luggage with supercar performance. We scrapped the idea of a mid engined layout but we knew we wanted RWD.
Instead the idea of a front engine RWD layout was explored. The only problem being you cannot really get a gearbox in between the footwells in the Y10 without moving the front seats back a bit and we didnt want to do this so the final idea ended up as a front engined RWD setup using an alfa 75 transaxle and suspension at the back of the Y10. We thought the de dion rear axle should provide a similar feel to the Y10's omega setup.
For the powerplant we have decided to use a 13b mazda rx7 turboII engine for its great power to weight propeties. I used to own an RX7 and it was great, the best thing about it was the engine. It never broke down or didnt start. I love the way you get an ever increasing amout of torque from these engines all the way to 8000rpm and more if you remove the limiter and port it etc. This engine is also very small. Having the turbo on the side makes it quite wide, however it is very short so it is well suited to the short wide engine bay of the Y10.
The Standard Y10 front suspension(sharing its trackcontrol arms and tie bars with the Fiat panda) was not going to be up to the job also I wanted to mount the rotary 50mm back into the bulkhead and this was not possible with the standard Y10 rack. The obvious up grade was to use the Alfa 75 double wishbone front suspension and steering rack. This also means the Y10 will share the Alfas wide track! We are going to keep the suspension ride height at pretty much the same as in the Alfa. The result of having gearbox at the back and the small light engine at the front should be a fast well balanced car.
The Alfa 75 2000cc TS donor car cost £120 on ebay. We hired a traior and made the journey in Adam's landrover to near Ayelesbury. When we got there the Alfa looked in pretty good nick. My first thought was 'its a shame to cut it up' but I could not let that get in my way.
The Y10 shell with the alfaromeo transaxle offered up to it. Looks like we didnt drain all the oil before we moved the gearbox oops.
We test drove the Alfa to see the sort of condition of the gearbox. It seemed ok, at least good enough to build and drive the car.
If any of you people reading this are big fans of the Alfa Romeo 75 look away now.
One Alfa 75 - a roof
Notice the Alfa has actually been cut in half right across the middle. Need to take about 12inches out of the floor pan.
Hopefully we are going to be able to get rid of the Alfa bulkhead but keep the inner wings around the wishbone and shock mounts. We are then going to build our own bulkhead further forward over the steering rack. This will be intergrated into a roll cage. We will have a drivable chassis before the body is ever fitted into the car.
Here you can see the front underside of the alfa complete with double wishbone suspension and torsion bars.
We are keeping the chassis rails from the Alfa but the sills will be replaced with deep reinforced frames. The two center legs will be extended right back to the rear crossmember. The alfa interior space is almost exactly the same width as the Y10's!
The torsion bars suspension is simple but it did seem to work fairly well on the Alfa. It will be used in the Y10 however if problems arise there is an expensive coilover conversion kit.
Not a great deal of progress to report. The priority now is my 1049cc turbo. Then the fun will start.
The rear section of the car is removed after a bit of grinding. I bought a big 9" angle grinder for this job, my mini grinder was just not up to it.
An inside shot of the back bit. I've always wanted a 75 but i want a rotary Y10 more!
Here you can see the Alfa looking more light weight. These are the main pieces of the floor pan we want to make our chassis.
