HACHI-BANGER

When you’ve got an old, rusty shell and rusty chassis lying around and want to go club racing, what do you do? Most would bin the shell and go find something that still has structural integrity. However, when that shell is an AE86, folk like Jamie Potts discover it’s too hard to send it off to the scrappy. So, instead, he cut the whole floor and chassis out of the thing and fabricated his own example.

As casual as that my sound in words, building your own chassis from scratch involves a bit more than a night or two in the shed, especially as Jamie’s is a full-length deal with Hiace diff, four-link, and Watt’s link, with coilovers.

“I only planned on doing a rear chassis, then cut some of the floor out and got a bit carried away there before deciding to make a front chassis, and then that joined the rear …”

The front corners use a double A-arm design and short-length coilovers, while an eight-point cage ties back into the chassis — the 86 body shell then slips over the whole package. And you won’t be finding a 1600cc four-banger in that engine bay, as Jamie favoured something of the eight-cylinder variety. He’s running an LS1 with custom headers to suit the chassis, backed by a T56 six-speed box: the mechanical package has been left simple for reliability, and with a humble goal of 280kW it’ll get the job done with a shitload of torque.